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- Prolegomena to the 


Study of Greek Religion 











Bondon: C. J. CLAY anv SONS, 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, 
AVE MARIA LANE. 


Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET. 





DLeipsig: F. A. BROCKHAUS. 
few Work: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND ©O., Lrp. 


[All Rights reserved.) 





Prolegomena to the 


Study of Greek Religion 


by 
JANE ELLEN HARRISON, 


D.LITT, (DURHAM), HON.| LL.D, AB 
y D LECTURER OF NEWNHAM COLLEGE 


Cambridge 
at the University Press 


192s 


Cambridge : 


PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, 


AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 





ARTURO ET MARGARITAE VERRALL 


HUIC AMICAE MEAE CONSTANTISSIMAE 
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INTRODUCTION. 


THE object of the following pages is to draw attention to 
some neglected aspects of Greek religion. 

Greek religion, as set forth in popular handbooks and even in 
more ambitious treatises, is an affair mainly of mythology, and 
moreover of mythology as seen through the medium of literature. 
In England, so far as I am aware, no serious attempt has been 
made to examine Greek ritual. Yet the facts of ritual are more 
easy definitely to ascertain, more permanent, and at least equally 
significant. What a people does in relation to its gods must, 
always be one clue, and perhaps the safest, to what it thinks. 
The first preliminary to any scientific understanding of Greek 
religion is a minute examination of its ritual. 

This habit of viewing Greek religion exclusively through 
the medium of Greek literature has brought with it an initial 
and fundamental error in method—an error which in England, 
where scholarship is mainly literary, is hkely to die hard. For 
literature Homer is the beginning, though every scholar is aware 
that he is nowise primitive; for theology, or—if we prefer so to 
call it—mythology, Homer presents, not a starting-point, but 
a culmination, a complete achievement, an almost meghanical 
accomplishment, with scarcely a hint of origines, an accomplish- 
ment moreover, which is essentially literary rather than religious, 
sceptical and moribund already in its very perfection. The 
Olympians of Homer are no more primitive than his hexameters. 
Beneath this splendid surface lies a stratum of religious conceptions, 
ideas of evil, of purification, of atonement, ignored or suppressed 
by Homer, but reappearmg in later poets and notably in 
Aeschylus. It is this substratum of religious conceptions, at 
once more primitive and more permanent, that I am concerned 


é ad 


Vill Introduction 


to investigate. Had ritual received its due share of attention, 
it had not remained so long neglected. 

I would guard against misapprehension. Literature as a 
starting-point for investigation, and especially the poems of 
Homer, I am compelled to disallow; yet literature is really 
my goal. I have tried to understand primitive rites, not from 
love of their archaism, nor yet wholly from a single-minded 
devotion to science, but with the definite hope that I might 
come to a better understanding of some forms of Greek poetry. 
Religious convention compelled the tragic poets to draw their 
plots from traditional mythology, from stories whose religious 
content and motive were already in Homer's days obsolete. 
A knowledge of, a certain sympathy with, the milieu of this 
primitive material is one step to the realization of its final form 
in tragedy. It is then in the temple of literature, if but as 
a hewer of wood and drawer of water, that I still hope to 
serve. 

As the evidence to be set before the reader is necessarily 
~ somewhat complex in detail, and the arguments of the successive _ 
chapters closely interdependent, it may be well at the outset to 
state, as simply as may be, the conclusions at which I have 
arrived, and to summarize briefly the steps of the discussion. 


In Chapter I. it is,established that the Greeks themselves 
in classical times recognized two forms of ritual, Olympian and 
Chthonic. It is further seen that the characteristic ritual of 
Homeric days was of the kind known to them as Olympian. 
Sacrifice in Homer takes the form of an offering to the god 
to induce his favour. Its formulary is do wt des. Moreover the 
sacrificial banquet to which the god is bidden is shared by the 
worshipper. In sharp contradistinction to this cheerful sacrificial 
feast, when we examine the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens, 
the Diasia, we find rites of quite other significance ; the sacrifice 
is a holocaust, it is devoted, made over entirely to the god, 
unshared by the worshipper, and its associations are gloomy. The 
rites of the Diasia, though ostensibly in honour of Zeus, are found 
really to be addressed to an underworld snake on whose worship 
that of Zeus has been superimposed, 

In the three chapters that follow, on the festivals of the 


Na ‘ 
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Introduction ix 


Anthesteria, Thargelia, and Thesmophoria, held respectively in 
the spring, summer, and autumn, the Olympian ritual super- 
imposed is taken as known and only alluded to in passing. 
The attention is focussed on the rites of the underlying stratum. 

In the Anthesteria, ostensibly sacred to Dionysos, the main 
ritual is found to be that of the placation of ghosts. Ghosts, it is 
found, were placated in order that they might be kept away; the 
formulary for these rites is not, as with the Olympians, do ut des, 
but do ut abeas. The object of these rites of Aversion, practised 
in the spring, is found to be strictly practical; it is the promotion 
of fertility by the purgation of evil influences. 

The ritual of the Thargelia is even more primitive and 
plain-spoken. In this festival of the early summer, ostensibly 
dedicated to Apollo, the first-fruits of the harvest are gathered 
in. The main gist of the festival is purification, necessary as 
a preliminary to this ingathering. Purification is effected by the 
ceremonial of the pharmakos. Though the festival in classical 
days was ‘sacred to’ Apollo, the pharmakos is nowise a ‘human 
sacrifice’ to a god, but a direct means of physical and moral - 
purgation, and again with a view to the promotion and conser- 
vation of fertility. 

Thus far it-will be seen that the rites of the lower stratum are 
characterized by a deep and constant sense of evil to be removed 
and of the need of purification for its removal; that the means 
of purification adopted are primitive and mainly magical nowise 
affects this religious content. 

This practical end of primitive ceremonies, the promotion of fer- 
tility by magical rites, comes out still more strongly in the autumn 
sowing festival of the Thesmophoria. Here the women attempt, 
by carrying certain magical sacra, the direct impulsion of nature. 
In connection with these sacra of the Thesmophoria the subject 
of ‘mysteries’ falls to be examined. The gist of all primitive 
mysteries is found to be the handling or tasting of certain sacra 
after elaborate purification. The sacra are conceived of as having 
magical, i.e. divine, properties. Contact with them is contact 
with a superhuman potency, which is taboo to the unpurified. 
The gist of a mystery is often the removal of a taboo. From the 
Olympian religion ‘mysteries’ appear to have been wholly 

absent. 


2 
. i ed Oe oY 


x Introduction 


In Chapter V. we pass from ritual to theology, from 
examination of rites performed to the examination of the bei 
to whom these rites were addressed. These beings, it is found, 
of the order of sprites, ghosts, and bogeys, rather than of comple 
articulate gods, their study that of demonology rather t 
theology. As their ritual has been shown to be mainly that of the 
Aversion of evil, so they and their shifting attributes are mainly 
of malevolent character. Man makes his demons in the image 
of his own savage and irrational passions. Aeschylus attempts, 
and the normal man fails, to convert his Erimyes into Semnai 
Theai. 

In Chapter VI. the advance is noted from demonology 
to theology, from the sprite and ghost to the human and humane 
god. The god begins to reflect not only human passions but 
humane relations. The primitive association of women with 
agriculture is seen to issue in the figures of the Mother and 
the Maid, and later of the Mother and the Daughter, later still 
in the numerous female trinities that arose out of this duality. 
In Chapter VII. the passage from ghost to god is clearly seen, 
and the humane relation between descendant and ancestor begets 
a kindliness which mollifies and humanizes the old religion 
of Aversion. The culminating point of the natural development 
of an anthropomorphic theology is here reached, and it is seen that 
the goddesses and the ‘hero-gods’ of the old order are, in their 
simple, non-mystic humanity, very near to the Olympians. 


At this point comes the great significant moment for Greece, 
the intrusion of a new and missionary faith, the religion of 
an immigrant god, Dionysos. 

In Chapter VIII. the Thracian origin of Dionysos is established. 
In his religion two elements are seen to coexist, the worship 
of an old god of vegetation on which was grafted the worship 
of a spirit of intoxication. The new impulse that he brought 
to Greece was the belief in enthusiasm, the belief that a man 
through physical intoxication at first, later through spiritual 
ecstasy, could pass from the human to the divine. 

This faith might have remained in its primitive savagery, 
and therefore for Greece ineffective, but for another religious 
impulse, that known to us under the name of Orpheus. To the 


“he aes 


Introduction xl 


discussion of Orphism the last four chapters IX.—XII. are de- 
voted. 


In Chapter IX. I have attempted to show that the name Orpheus’ 


stands for a real personality. I have hazarded the conjecture that 
Orpheus came from Crete bringing with him, perhaps ultimately 
from Egypt, a religion of spiritual asceticism which yet included 
the ecstasy of the religion of Dionysos. Chapter X. is devoted 
to the elucidation of the Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries. It has 
been shown that before the coming of the Orphic and Dionysiac 
religion the mysteries consisted simply in the handling of certain 
sacra after elaborate purification. By handling these sacra man 
came into contact with some divine potency. To this rudimentary 
mysticism Orphism added the doctrine of the possibility of 


complete union with the divine. This union was effected in the 


primitive Cretan rite of the Omophagia by the physical eating 
of the god; union with the divine was further symbolically 
effected by the rite of the Sacred Marriage, and union by adoption 
by the rite of the Sacred Birth. The mission of Orphism was 
to take these primitive rites, originally of the crudest sympathetic 
magic, and inform them with a deep spiritual mysticism. The rite 
of the Omophagia found no place at Eleusis, but the other two 
sacramental rites of union, the Sacred Marriage and the Sacred 
Birth, formed ultimately its central mysteries. 

With the doctrine and ritual of union with the divine there 
came as a necessary corollary the doctrine that man could attain 
the divine attribute of immortality. Orphic eschatology is the 
subject of Chapter XI. Its highest spiritual form, the belief 
that perfect purity issued in divinity and hence in immortality, 
is found expressed in the Orphic tablets. Its lower expression, 
the belief in a Hades of eternal punishment as contrasted with the 
shadowy after-world of Homer, is seen in the vases of Lower Italy 
and the eschatology denounced by Plato. 

Finally in Chapter XII. it is shown how, as a concomitant 
te their Eschatology, the Orphics, unlike Homer, evolved a 
Cosmogony, and with this Cosmogony was ultimately bound 
up a peculiar and philosophic theology. In the fifth century B.c. 
the puppet-show of the Olympians was well-nigh played out, 
but the two gods of the Orphics remained potent. In ritual they 
worshipped Dionysos, but their theoretical theology recognized 


\ 


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as ni 
* x 


xil Introduction 


Eros as source of all things. The Eros of the Orphics was a 
mystery-being, a daimon rather than a theos, a potency wholly 
alien to the clear-cut humanities of Olympus. 


With the consideration of Orphism it has become, I hope, 
abundantly clear why at the outset attention was focussed on the 
primitive rites of Aversion and Purification rather than on the 
Service of the Olympians. The ritual embodied in the formulary 
do ut des is barren of spiritual content. The ritual embodied 
in do ut abeas contains at least the recognition of one great 
mystery of life, the existence of evil. The rites of the Olympians 
were left untouched by the Orphics; the rites of purification 
and of sympathetic magic lent them just the symbolism they 
needed. Moreover even in theology the crude forms of demons 
were more pliant material for mysticism than the clear-cut 
limitations and vivid personality of the Olympians. Orphism was 
the last word of Greek religion, and the ritual of Orphism was but 
the revival of ancient practices with a new significance. 


The reader will note that in the pages that follow, two 
authors, Plutarch and Euripides, have been laid under special 
contribution. Plutarch’s gentle conservatism made him cling 
tenaciously to antique faith. According to him, one function 
of religion was to explain and justify established rites, and in the 
course of his attempted justification he tells us many valuable 
ritual facts. Euripides, instant in his attack on the Olympian 
gods, yet treats with respect the two divinities of Orphism, 
Dionysos and Eros. I have suggested that, born as he was 
at Phlya, the ancient home of Orphic mysteries, his attitude 
on this matter may have been influenced by early associations. 
In any case, a religion whose chief divinities were reverently 
handled by Euripides cannot be dismissed as a decadent maleficent 
superstition. 


I would ask that the chapters I have written be taken strictly 
as they are meant, as Prolegomena. I am deeply conscious that 
in surveying so wide a field I have left much of interest un- 
touched, still more only roughly sketched in. I wished to present 
my general theory in broad outline for criticism before filling in 


Introduction Xill 


details, and I hope in the future to achieve a study of Orphism 
that may have more claim to completeness. If here I have 
dwelt almost exclusively on its strength and beauty, I am not 
unaware that it has, like all mystical religions, a weak and 


ugly side. 


If in these Prolegomena I have accomplished anything, this 
is very largely due to the many friends who have helped me; 
the pleasant task remains of acknowledging my obligations. 


My grateful thanks are offered to the Syndics of the 
University Press for undertaking the publication of this book ; 
to the Syndics of the University Library and the Fitzwilliam 
Museum for the courtesy they have shown in allowing me free 
access to their libraries; to my own College, which, by electing me 
to a Fellowship, has given me for three years the means and 
leisure to devote myself to writing. 

For the illustrations they have placed at my disposal I must 
record my debt to the Trustees of the British Museum, to the 
Hellenic Society, the German Archaeological Institute, and the 
Ecole Francaise of Athens. The sources of particular plates are 
acknowledged in the notes. The troublesome task of drawing 
from photographs and transcribing inscriptions has been most: 
kindly undertaken for me by Mrs Hugh Stewart. 


Passing to literary obligations, it will be evident that in 
the two first chapters I owe much, as regards philology, to the 
late Mr R. A. Neil. His friendship and his help were lost to me 
midway in my work, and that loss has been irreparable. 

It is a pleasure to me to remember gratefully that to Sir 
Richard Jebb I owe my first impulse to the study of Orphism. 
The notes in his edition of the Characters of Theophrastos first 
led me as a student into the by-paths of Orphic literature, 
and since those days the problem of Orphism, though often of 
necessity set aside, has never ceased to haunt me. 

To Professor Ridgeway I owe much more than can appear 
on the surface. The material for the early portion of my book 
was collected many years ago, but, baffled by the ethnological 
problems it suggested, I laid it aside in despair. The appearance 


X1v Introduction 


of Professor Ridgeway’s article, ‘What people made the objects 
called Mycenaean ?’ threw to me an instant flood of light on the 
problems of ritual and mythology that perplexed me, and I returned 
to my work with fresh courage. Since then he has, with the 
utmost kindness, allowed me to attend his professorial lectures 
and frequently to refer to him my difficulties. I have thought 
it best finally to state my own argument independently of his 
ethnological conclusions, first because those conclusions are, at the 
time I write, only in part before the public, but chiefly because 
I hoped that by stating my evidence independently it might, 
in the comparatively narrow sphere in which I work, offer some 
slight testimony to the truth of his illuminating theories. 

To all workers in the field of primitive religion Dr Frazer's 
writings have become so part and parcel of their mental furniture 
that special acknowledgement has become almost superfluous. 
But I cannot deny myself the pleasure of acknowledging a deep 
and frequent debt, the more as from time to time I have been 
allowed to ask for criticism on individual points, and my request, 
as the notes will show, has always met with generous response. 

Mr F. M. Cornford of Trinity College has, with a kindness and 
patience for which I can offer no adequate thanks, undertaken the 
revision of my proof-sheets. To him I owe not only any degree 
of verbal accuracy attained, but also, which is much more, 
countless valuable suggestions made from time to time in the 
course of my work. Many other scholars have allowed me to 
refer to them on matters outside my own competency. Some 
of these debts are acknowledged in the notes, but I wish 
specially to thank Dr A. 8. Murray, Mr Cecil Smith and Mr 
A. H. Smith of the British Museum for constant facilities afforded 
to me in my work there, and Mr R. C. Bosanquet and Mr M. 
Tod for help in Athens; and, in Cambridge, Dr Haddon, Dr Hans 
Gadow, Mr Francis Darwin, Mr H. G. Dakyns and Mr A. B. Cook. 

My debt to Dr A. W. Verrall is so great and constant that 
it is hard to formulate. If in one part of my book more than 
another I am indebted to him it is in the discussion of the 
Krinyes. Chapter V. indeed owes its inception to Dr Verrall’s 
notes in his edition of the Choephorot, and its final form to his 
unwearied criticism. Throughout the book there is scarcely a 
literary difficulty that he has not allowed me to refer to him, and 


Introduction XV 


his sure scholarship and luminous perception have dissipated for 
me many a mental fog. 

Mr Gilbert Murray has written for me the critical Appendix 
on the text of the Orphic tablets, a matter beyond my competence. 
Many verse translations, acknowledged in their place, are also by 
him, and uniformly those from the Bacchae and Hippolytus 
of Euripides. It is to Mr Murray’s translation of the Bacchae 
that finally, as regards the religion of Dionysos, I owe most. The 
beauty of that translation, which he kindly allowed me to use 
before its publication, turned the arduous task of investigation 
into a labour of delight, and throughout the later chapters of the 
book, the whole of which he has read for me in proof, it will 
be evident that, in many difficult places, his sensitive and wise 
imagination has been my guide. 


JANE ELLEN HARRISON. 


NEWNHAM COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
September 9, 1903. 


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TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER I. 


OLYMPIAN AND CHTHONIC RITUAL. 


Mr Ruskin on the absence of fear in the Greek genius, Religion, to writers 
of the fifth century B.c., mainly a matter of festivals. In the Huthyphron 
religion is ‘doing business with the gods,’ a form of ‘tendance ’ (Oeparreia). 
Contrast of Sevordaipovia, ‘fear of spirits.’ Plutarch on ‘ fear of spirits.’ Dis- 
tinction drawn by Isocrates and others between Olympian and apotropaic 
ritual. Contrast between ‘Tendance’ (epareia) and ‘ Aversion’ (amorporn). 
Sacrifice to Zeus in Homer is a banquet shared. Contrast of the ritual of 
the Diasia. The holocaust or uneaten sacrifice. Ritual of the Diasia addressed 
primarily to an underworld snake. Superposition of the Homeric Zeus. 
Evidence of art. The ‘ Dian’ fleece, not the ‘fleece of Zeus’ but the fleece 
of magical purification. Examination of the Attic calendar. The names of 
festivals not connected with the names of Olympian divinities. The ritual of 
these festivals belongs to a more primitive stratum than that of the Olympians, 
pp. 1—-31. 


CHAPTER II. 


THe ANTHESTERIA. THE RITUAL OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES. 


The Anthesteria, ostensibly dedicated to Dionysos, a spring festival of the 
revocation and aversion cf ghosts. Examination of the rites of the three days. 
Meaning of the Chytroi, the Choes and the Pithoigia. Derivation of the 
word Anthesteria. Rites of purgation among the Romans in February. The 
Feralia and Lupercalia. The ritual of ‘devotion’ (évay:opoi). Contrast of 
dvew and evayifew. The word dvev used of burnt sacrifice to the Olympians, 
the word evayi¢ew of ‘devotion’ to underworld deities. The ritual of amovippa. 
Gist of the word evayi¢ew is purgation by means of placation of ghosts. Con- 
trast of fepeiov, the victim sacrificed and eaten, with opdyor, the victim sacri- 
ficed and ‘devoted.’ The of@daya in use for the taking of oaths, for purification, 
for omens, for sacrifice to winds and other underworld powers. Elements of 
_ ‘tendance’ in the ritual of ‘aversion,’ pp. 32—74. 
mio 






xviii Table of Contents 


CHAPTER III. 


Harvest Festivats. THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA. 


The Thargelia an early summer festival of first-fruits. The Eiresione. 
Object of the offering of first-fruits a release from taboo. The Australian 
Intichiuma. Removal of taboo developes into idea of consecration, dedication, ' 
sacrifice. The material of sacrifice. The god fares as the worshipper, but 
sometimes, from conservatism, fares worse. Instances in ritual of survival of 
primitive foods. The ovdAoyira, the pelanos and the nephalia. The fireless 
sacrifice. The bringing in of first-fruits preceded by ceremonies of purification. 
The pharmakos. Details of the ritual. The pharmakos only incidentally a 
‘human sacrifice.’ Its object physical and spiritual purgation. Meaning of 
the term. The pharmakos in Egypt, at Chaeronea, at Marseilles. Analogous 
ceremonies. The Charila at Delphi. The Bouphonia. The Stepterion. 
Further ceremonies of purification. The Kallynteria, Plynteria, Vestalia. 
General conclusion: in the Thargelia the gist of sacrifice is purification, 
a magical cleansing as a preparation for the incoming of first-fruits, 
pp. 75—119. 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE Women’s Ferstivats. THESMOPHORIA, ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA 
) ’ ? 
STENIA, HAtoa. 


Importance of these festivals as containing the germ of ‘ Mysteries.’ 
Detailed examination of the ritual of the Thesmophoria. The Kathodos and 
Anodos, the Nesteia, the Kalligeneia.. Gist of the rites the magical impulsion 
of fertility by burying sacra in the ground. Magical rites preceded by purifi- 
cation and fasting. Analogy of Arrephoria, Skirophoria and Stenia with 
Thesmophoria. Meaning of the word Thesmophoria, the carrying of magical 
sacra. Magical spells, curses and law. @eopds and vdopos. The curse and the 
law. The Dirae of Teos. The Haloa, a festival of the threshing-floor, later 
taken over by Dionysos. Tabooed foods. Eleusinian Mysteries a primitive 
harvest-festival. Order of the ritual. The pig of purification. Other rites 
of purification. The tokens of the mysteries. Ancient confessions rather of 
the nature of Confiteor than Credo. The fast and the partaking of the sykeon. 
The Kernophoria. Ancient mysteries in their*earliest form consist of the 
tasting of first-fruits and the handling of sacra after preliminary purification, 
pp. 120—162. 





Table of Contents Xix 


ICEL AER Ve 
THE DEMOoNOLOGY OF GHOosTS, SPRITES AND BoGeys. 


Primitive demonology constantly in flux. Various connotations of the 
word Ker. The Ker as evil sprite, the Ker as bacillus of disease. The Keres 
of Old Age and Death. The Keras Harpy and Wind-Daimon. The Ker as 
Fate in Homer and Hesiod. The Ker as Gorgon. Origin of the Gorgoneion. 
Apotropaic masks. The Gorgon developed from the Gorgoneion. The Graiae. 
The Evil Eye. The KerasSiren. The Sirens of Homer. Problem of the bird- 
form in art. The Siren as midday daimon. The Siren on funeral monuments. 
The bird-form of the soul in Greece and Egypt. Plato’s Sirens. The Ker as 
Sphinx. Mantic aspect of Sphinx. The Sphinx as Man-slaying Ker, as 
Funeral Monument. The Ker as Erinys. The Erinyes as angry Keres. 
Erinys an adjectival epithet. The Erinyes primarily the ghosts of slain men 
crying for vengeance. The Erinyes developed by Homer and Herakleitos into 
abstract ministers of vengeance. The Erinyes of Aeschylus more primitive 
than the Erinyes of Homer. The blood-curse in the Choephorot. The Erinyes 
of the stage. The Erinyes analogous to Gorgons and Harpies, but not 
identical. The wingless Erinyes of Aeschylus. The winged Erinyes of later 
art. The Poinae. The Erinys as snake. The Semnai Theat. New cult 
at Athens. New underworld ritual. The transformation of Erinyes 
into Semnai Theai. The Eumenides at Colonos, at Megalopolis, at Argos, 
pp. 163—256. 


CHAPTER VI.’ 
THE MAKING OF A GODDESS. 


Anthropomorphism. Gradual elimination of animal forms. The gods 
begin to mirror human relations and at first those of ‘matriarchal’ type. The 
. Mother and the Maid, two forms of one woman-goddess. The Great Mother as 
Ilérvia Onpav, as Kourotrophos. Influence of agriculture. Relation of women 
to primitive agriculture. Demeter and Kore as Mother and Maid rather than 
Mother and Daughter. Gradual predominance of the Maid over the Mother. 
The Anodos of the Maiden. Influence of mimetic agricultural rites. The 
evidence of vase-paintings. Pandora Mother and Maid. The Hesiodic story. 
The Maiden-Trinities. Origin of Trinities from the duality of Mother and 
Maid. Korai, Charites, Aglaurides, Nymphs. The Judgment of Paris a 
rivalry of three dominant Korai —Hera, Athene and Aphrodite. Evidence of 
 yase-paintings. Development of Athene, her snake- and bird-forms. Athene 
finally a frigid impersonation of Athens. Developement of Aphrodite. Myth 
of her sea-birth. Its origin in a ritual bath. The Ludoyisithrone. Ultimate 
dominance of the mother-form of Aphrodite as Genetrix. Hera as maiden. 
’ Her marriage with Zeus. Intrusion of Olympian ‘patriarchal’ cults on the 
yorsnip of the Mother and the Maid. Evidence from art, pp. 257—322. 






+ 


= Table of Contents 


CHAPTER. yar + 


THE. MAKING OF A GoD. 


The passage from ghost to god more plainly seen in the cult of heroes 
than in that of heroines. Instances from heroine-worship. Helen and Hebe. 
The hero as snake. Origin of the bearded snake. Heroes called by adjectival 
cultus-titles rather than personal names. The ‘nameless’ gods of the 
Pelasgians. The name ‘hero’ adjectival. Origin of supposed ‘ euphemistic’ 
titles. The ‘Blameless’ Aigisthos. The ‘Blameless’ Salmoneus. Antagonism 
between the gods proper of the Olympian system and local heroes. Benefi- 
cence of the heroes. Asklepios and the heroes of healing. Asklepios originally 
a hero-snake. Evidence of votive reliefs. Amynos and Dexion. The ‘Hero- 
Feasts.’ Cult of Hippolytus. Zeus Philios. Hero-Feasts lead to Theoxenia. 
Type of the Hero-Feast taken over by Dionysos. Evidence from reliefs, 
pp. 328—363. : 


CHAPTER VIII. 


DIONYSOS. 


* Mystical character of the religion of Dionysos. Dionysos an immigrant 


Thracian. The legend of Lycurgus. Historical testimony. In Euripides 
Dionysos an oriental. Explanation of apparent discrepancy. The Satyrs. 
Analogy with the Centaurs. The Satyrs represent an indigenous people who 
became worshippers of Dionysos. Cheiron the good Centaur. The Maenads 
not merely mythological. The Thyiades of historical times. The Maenads, 
Thyiades, Bacchants, women possessed by Dionysos. They are the nurses of 
the god and worship him as Liknites. Dionysos son of Semele. Semele the 
Earth-Mother. Cult of thunder-smitten places. Dionysos son of Zeus. Zeus 
adopts Dionysos as god of the grape. Examination of the titles Bromios, 
Braites, Sabazios. All three are titles of a god of a cereal intoxicant. The 
cereal intoxicant preceded in the North the intoxicant made from the grape. 
Tragedy the song of the cereal drink. Dionysos emerges from obscurity as 
god of the grape. Dionysos the tree and vegetation god. Evidence of art. 
The ‘ Principle of Moisture” Dionysos the Bull-god. Animal incarnations. 
The ‘return to nature.’ Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb. Dithyrambos the 
Mystery-Babe. Plutarch on the Dithyramb. Possible association with the 
Bee-Maidens, the Thriae. Moderation of the Greek in the use of wine. Sacra- 
mentalism of eating and drinking. The escstasy of aceticism, pp. 364—454, 


- 


Table of Contents XX] 


CHAPTER IX. 


ORPHEUS. 


Problem of relation between Orpheus and Dionysos. Analogy and contrast 
between the two. Orpheus a Thracian; a magical musician. Possible 
Cretan origin of Orpheus. The island route from Crete to Thrace. The 
death of Orpheus. Representations on vase-paintings. Orpheus an enemy of 
the Maenads. His burial and the cult at his tomb. His oracle at Lesbos. 
His relation to Apollo. Orpheus a real man, a reformer, and possibly a 


martyr ; heroized but never deified. Orpheus as reformer of Bacchic rites. » 


‘Influence of Orphism at Athens. New impulse brought by Orphism into 
Greek religion. Spiritualization of the old Dionysiac doctrine of divine 


possession. Contrast with the anthropomorphism of Homer and Pindar. 
Consecration the keynote of Orphic religion, pp. 455—478. 


CHAPTER X. 


OrpHIC AND Dionystac MyYstTERIEs. 


Our chief source a fragment of the Oretans of Euripides. The Idaean 
Zeus the same as Zagreus. The Omophagia or feast of raw flesh. The bull- 
victim. Bull-worship in Crete. The Minotaur. Evidence of Clement of 
Alexandria as to the Omophagia. Narrative of Firmicus Maternus. Analo- 
gous Omophagia among primitive Arabs. Account of Nilus. Sacramental 
union with the god by eating his flesh. Reminiscences of human sacrifice in 
Greek tradition. The Titans and the infant Zagreus. The Titans white- 
earth men. The smearing with gypsum. The Orphic doctrine of the dis- 
membered god. The Mountain Mother. Her image on a Cretan seal 
impression. The Kouretes her attendants. The final consecration of the 
mystic. Meaning of the word écvwdeis, ‘consecrated.’ Orphic taboos. Orphic 
formalism. Parody of Orphic rites of initiation in the Clouds of Aristophanes.: 
The ‘shady side’ of Orphism. The Liknophoria. Dionysos Liknites. 
Symbolism of the zknon. Purification, rebirth. The /étnon and the Homeric 
ptyon. The liknon in marriage ceremonies. The Sacred Marriage. Orphic 
elements in Eleusinian Ritual. Iacchos at Eleusis. The Liknophoria at 
Eleusis. The Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth at Eleusis, Thessalian 
influence, Brimo. Thracian influence, Eumolpos. Dionysos at Eleusis. As 
child, and as grown man. The pantomime element in the cult of Dionysos. 
Its influence on the Eleusinian Mysteries, pp. 479— 572. 





x 


] 


. 


Xxil Table of Contents 


CHAPTER XI. 
OrpHic EscHAToLoGy. 


The tablets our chief source for Orphic doctrines. Their provenance and 
general character. The Petelia tablet of the British Museum. Analogous 
tablets from Crete. The Well of Mnemosyne. Parallels in Fiji and Egypt. 
Lethe in Greek Literature. Lethe in the ritual of Trophonios. The river of 
Eunoé, Good Consciousness, in Dante. Ths Sybaris tablets. The tablet of 
Caecilia Secundina. The confession of Ritual Acts on the Sybaris tablets. 
The attainment of divinity through purification. The escape from the Wheel. 
The kid and the milk. The formulary of adoption. Eschatology on Orphic 
vases from Lower Italy. Orpheus in Hades. The tortured criminals. De- 
velopement by Orphism of doctrine of eternal punishment. The Danaides and 
the Uninitiated, pp. 573—624. 


CHARTER Xa. 
ORPHIC CosMOGONY. 


Orphic theology as seen in the Hymns. The World-Egg. Use of eggs in 


‘Orphic ritual of purification. Birth of Eros from World-Egg. Complex 


origin of Orphic Eros. Eros as Herm. Eros as Ker of life. Evidence of 
art. Eros as Ephebos. Eros and the Earth-Mother. Eros present at the 
Anodos. Evidence of art. The Mystery-cult at Phlya, the birthplace of 
Euripides. Pythagorean revival of the cult of the Mother. The mystic Eros 
as Phanes and Protogonos. Contaminatio of Eros and Dionysos. Popular 
Orphism on vases from Thebes. Eros as Proteurhythmos. The divinities of 
Orphism are demons rather than gods. Orphism resumed, pp. 625—659. 


CriticAL APPENDIX ON THE. ORPHIC TABLETS . pp. 660—674 
INDEX 
I. Greek : : : s : ‘ : pp. 675, 676 


Il. General. , ; : ‘ ; i pp. 676—680 





CHAPTER I. 


OLYMPIAN AND CHTHONIC RITUAL. 


“AIMOCI MEIAIYIOICIN IAACMATA KAI MAKAPECCIN 
OYPANIOIC.’ 


In characterizing the genius of the Greeks Mr Ruskin says: 
‘there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often 
deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in 
» the presence of all Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed 
from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest. The lovely 
words are spoken of course mainly with reference to art, but they 
are meant also to characterize the Greek in his attitude towards 
the invisible, in his religion—meant to shew that the Greek, the 
favoured child of fortune yet ever unspoilt, was exempt from the 
discipline to which the rest of mankind has been subject, never 
needed to learn the lesson that in the Fear of the Lord is the 
beginning of Wisdom. 

At first sight it seems as though the statement were broadly 
true. Greek writers of the fifth century B.c. have a way of speak- 
ing of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly 
a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, 
whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is 
but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh 
and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and. 
atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the general 
splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians 
of the fifth century B.c. express the same spirit. Thucydides 
‘is assuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him in the 
main ‘a rest from toil.’ He makes Pericles say!: ‘Moreover we have 


1 Thue. 11. 38. 


2 Olympian and Chthonie Ritual [CH. 


provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by 
the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.’ 

Much the same* external, quasi-political, and always cheerful 
attitude towards religion is taken by the ‘Old Oligarch’’ He is of 
course thoroughly orthodox and even pious, yet to him the main 
gist of religion appears to be a decorous social enjoyment. In easy 
aristocratic fashion he rejoices that religious ceremonials exist to 
provide for the less well-to-do citizens suitable amusements that 
they would otherwise lack. ‘As to sacrifices and sanctuaries and 
festivals and precincts, the People, knowing that it is impossible for 
each poor man individually to sacrifice and feast and have sanctu- 
aries and a beautiful and ample city, has discovered by what means 


_he may enjoy these privileges. The whole state accordingly at 


the common cost sacrifices many victims, while it 1s the People 
who feast on them and divide them among themselves by lot’; 


and again”, as part of the splendour of Athens, he notes that 
‘she celebrates twice as many religious holidays as any other city.’ 


The very language used by this typical Athenian gentleman 
speaks for itself. Burnt-sacrifice (Ovcia), feasting, agonistic games, 
stately temples are to him the essence of religion ; the word saeri- 
fice brings to his mind not renunciation but a social banquet; the 
temple is not to him so much the awful dwelling-place of a 
divinity as an integral part of a ‘ beautiful and ample city” | 
Thucydides and Xenophon need and attempt no searching 
analysis of religion. Socrates of course sought a definition, a 
definition that left him himself sad and dissatisfied, but that 
adequately embodied popular sentiment and is of importance for 
our enquiry. The end of the Luthyphron is the most disappointing 
thing in Plato; Socrates extracts from Euthyphron what-he thinks 


religion is; what Socrates thought he cannot or will not tell® 


Socrates in his enquiry uses not one abstract term for religion 
—the Greeks have in fact no one word that covers the whole 
field—he uses two‘, piety (To evoaeBés) and holiness (7d éccor), 


1 Ps,-Xen. Rep. Athen. 11. 99. 2 Ps.-Xen. Rep. Athen. m1. 8. 

® Plat. Wuthyph. 15 v. 

4 So far as it is possible to distinguish the two, 7d edweBés is religion from man’s 
side, his attitude towards the gods, rd écvov religion from the gods’ side, the claim 
they make on man. 70 éovoy is the field of what is made over, consecrated to the 
gods. The further connotations of the word as employed by Orphism will be 
discussed later. ‘Holiness’ is perhaps the nearest equivalent to 7d écvov in the 
Luthyphron. 


Pr Socrates on Religion , oa 


Euthyphron of course begins with cheerful confidence: he and all 
other respectable men know quite well what piety and_ holiness 
are. He willingly admits that ‘holiness is a part of justice, 
that part of justice that appertains to the gods; it is giving 
the gods their due. He also allows, not quite seeing to what 
the argument is tending, that piety and holiness are ‘a sort of tend- 
ance (Gepareia) of the gods.’ This ‘tendance,’ Socrates presses on, 
‘must be of the nature of service or ministration,’ and Euthyphron 
adds that it is the sort of service that servants shew their masters. 
Socrates wants to know in what particular work and operation the 
gods need help and ministration. Euthyphron answers with some 
impatience that, to put it plainly and cut the matter short, holiness 
consists in ‘a man understanding how to do what is pleasing to 
the gods in word and deed, ie. by prayer and sacrifice.’ Socrates 
eagerly seizes his advantage and asks: ‘You mean then that 
holiness is a sort of science of praying and sacrificing?’ ‘ Further, 
he adds, ‘sacrifice is giving to the gods, prayer is asking of them, 
holiness then is a science of asking and giving.’ If we give to the 
gods they must want something of us, they must want to ‘do 
business with us.’ ‘Holiness is then an art in which gods and men 
do business with each other. So Socrates triumphantly con- 
cludes, to the manifest discomfort of Euthyphron, who however can 
urge no tenable objection. He feels as a pious man that the 
essence of the service or tendance he owes to the gods is of the 
nature of a freewill tribute of honour, but he cannot deny that the 
gods demand this as a guid pro quo. 

Socrates, obviously unfair though he is, puts his finger on the 
weak spot of Greek religion as orthodoxly conceived in the fifth 
century B.c. Its formula is do ut des. It is, as Socrates says, a 
‘business transaction’ and one in which, because god is greater 
than man, man gets on the whole the best of it. The argument of 
the Huthyphron is of importance to us because it clearly defines 
one, and a prominent, factor in Greek religion, that of service 
(Oeparreia), and in this service, this kindly ‘ tendance,’ there is no 
element of fear. If man does his part in the friendly transaction, 
the gods will do theirs. None of the deeper problems of what we 
moderns call religion are even touched: there is no question 
of sin, repentance, sacrificial atonement, purification, no fear of 
judgment to come, no longing after a future complete beatitude. 


ees, 


+ Olympian and Chthonice Ritual [ CH. 


Man offers what seems to him in his ignorance a reasonable 
service to gods conceived of as human and rational. There is no 
trace of scepticism; the gods certainly exist, otherwise as Sextus 
Empiricus! quaintly argues ‘ you could not serve them’: and they 
have human natures. ‘You do not serve Hippocentauri, because 
Hippocentauri are non-existent.’ 

To the average orthodox Greek the word @epazre/a, service, 
tendance, covered a large, perhaps the largest, area of his conception 
of religion. It was a word expressing, not indeed in the Christian 
sense a religion whose mainspring was love, but at least a religion 
based on a rational and quite cheerful mutual confidence. The 
Greeks have however another word expressive of religion, which 
embodies a quite other attitude of mind, the word devovdacuovia, 
fear of spirits; fear, not tendance, fear not of gods but of spirit- 
things, or, to put it abstractly, of the supernatural. 

It is certainly characteristic of the Greek mind that the word 
devovdatmovia and its cognates early began to be used in a bad 
sense, and this to some extent bears out Mr Ruskin’s assertion. 
By the time of Theophrastos 6 deccvda/uer is frankly in our sense 
‘the superstitious man,’ and superstition Theophrastos defines as 
not just and proper reverence but simply ‘cowardice in regard 
to. the supernatural.’ Professor Jebb* has pointed out that already 
in Aristotle the word devocdaiu@v has about it a suspicion of its 
weaker side. An absolute ruler, Aristotle® says, will be the more 
powerful ‘if his subjects believe that he fears the spiritual beings’ 
(€ay Sevodaipova vouifwowy eivar) but he adds significantly ‘he 
must shew himself such without fatwity’ (avev aBedtepias). 

Plutarch has left us an instructive treatise on ‘the fear of the 
supernatural. He saw in this fear, this superstition, the great 
element of danger and weakness in the religion that he loved so 
well. His intellect steeped in Platonism revolted from its un- 
meaning folly, and his gentle gracious temperament shrank from 
its cruelty. He sees* in superstition not only an error, a wrong 
judgment of the mind, but that worse thing a ‘wrong judgment 
inflamed by passion. Atheism is a cold error, a mere dislocation 
of the mind: superstition is a ‘dislocation complicated, inflamed, 

1 Sext. Empir. adv. Math. rx. 123. 


2 The Characters of Theophrastus, p. 264. 
% Arist. Polit. p. 1315 a 1. 4 Plut. de Superstit. 1. 


——— 


1] Plutarch on Superstition 5 


by a bruise.’ ‘Atheism is an apathy towards the divine which 
fails to perceive the good: superstition is an excess of passion 
which suspects the good to be evil; the superstitious are afraid of 
the gods yet fly to them for refuge, flatter and yet revile them, 
invoke them and yet heap blame upon them.’ 

Superstition grieved Plutarch in two ways. He saw that it 
terrified men and made them miserable, and he wanted all men 
to be as cheerful and kindly as himself; it also made men think 
evil of the gods, fear them as harsh and cruel. He knew that the 
canonical religion of the poets was an adequate basis for super- 
stitious fear, but he had made for himself a way out of the 
difficulty, a way he explains in his treatise on ‘How the poets 
ought to be taken.’ ‘If Ares be evil spoken of we must imagine it 
to be said of War, if Hephaistos of Fire, if Zeus of Fate, but if 
anything honourable it is said of the real godst” Plutarch was too 
gentle to say sharply and frankly : 


‘If gods do aught that’s shameful, they are no gods”, 


but he shifted the element of evil, of fear and hate, from his 
theological ideals to the natural and purely human phenomena 
from which they had emerged. He wants to treat the gods and 
regard them as he himself would be treated and regarded, as 
kindly civilized men. ‘ What!’ he says’, ‘is he who thinks there are 
no gods an impious man, while he who describes them as the 
superstitious man does, does he not hold views much more impious ? 
Well anyhow I for my part would rather people would say of me 
there never was or is any such a man as Plutarch, than that they 
should say Plutarch is an unstable, changeable fellow, irritable, 
vindictive, and touchy about trifles; if you invite friends to 
dinner and leave out Plutarch, or if you are busy and omit to call 
on him, or if you do not stop to speak to him, he will fasten on 
you and bite you, or he will catch your child and beat him, or turn 
his beast loose into your crops and spoil your harvest.’ 

But though he is concerned for the reputation of the gods, his 
chief care and pity are for man. Atheism shuts out a man, he says, 
from the pleasant things of life. ‘These most pleasant things,’ 
he adds* in characteristic fashion, ‘are festivals and feastings in 


1 Plut. de aud. poet. 1, 2 Hur. frg. 292. 
3 Plut. de Superstit. x. 4 Plut. de Superstit. 1x. 


a 


6 Olympian and Chthonie Ritual [ CH. 


connection with sacred things, and initiations and orgiastic festi- 
vals, and invocations and adorations of the gods. At these most 
pleasant things the atheist can but laugh his sardonic laugh, but 
the superstitious man would fain rejoice and cannot, his soul is 
like the city of Thebes: 


“Tt brims with incense and burnt sacrifice 

And brims with paeans and with lamentations.” 
A garland is on his head and pallor on his face, he offers 
sacrifice and is afraid, he prays and yet his tongue falters, he offers 
incense and his hand trembles, he turns the saying of Pythagoras 
into foolishness “Then we become best when we approach the 
gods, for those who fear spirits when they approach the shrines 
and dwellings of the gods make as though they came to the dens 
of bears and the holes of snakes and the lairs of sea-monsters.”’ In 
his protest against the religion of fear Plutarch rises to a real 
eloquence’. ‘ He that dreads the gods dreads all things, earth and 
sea, air and heaven, darkness and light, a voice, a silence, a dream. 
Slaves forget their masters in sleep, sleep looses their fetters, 
salves their gangrened sores, but for the superstitious man his 
reason is always adreaming but his fear always awake.’ 

Plutarch is by temperament, and perhaps also by the decadent 
time in which he lived, unable to see the good side of the religion 
of fear, unable to realize that in it was implicit a real truth, the 
consciousness that all is not well with the world, that there is 
such a thing as evil. Tinged with Orphism as he was, he took it 
by its gentle side and never realized that it was this religion of 
fear, of consciousness of evil and sin and the need of purification, 
of which Orphism took hold and which it transformed to new 
issues. The cheerful religion of ‘tendance’ had in it no seeds of 
spiritual development; by Plutarch’s time, though he failed to see 
this, it had done its work for civilization. 

Still less could Plutarch realize that what in his mind was a 
degradation, superstition in our sense, had been to his predecessors 
a vital reality, the real gist of their only possible religion. He 
deprecates the attitude of the superstitious man who enters the 
presence of his gods as though he were approaching the hole of a 
snake, and forgets that the hole of a snake had been to his ancestors, 


1 Plut. de Superstit. m1. 


iy? Plutarch on Superstition i 


and indeed was still to many of his contemporaries, literally 
and actually the sanctuary of a god. He has explained and 
mysticized away all the primitive realities of his own beloved 
religion. It can, I think, be shewn that what Plutarch regards 
as superstition was in the sixth and even the fifth century before 
the Christian era the real religion of the main bulk of the 
people, a religion not of cheerful tendance but of fear and de- 
precation. The formula of that religion was not do ut des ‘I give 
that you may give, but do ut abeas ‘I give that you may go, and 
keep away. The beings worshipped were not rational, human, 
law-abiding gods, but vague, irrational, mainly malevolent daiuoves, 
spirit-things, ghosts and bogeys and the like, not yet formulated 
and enclosed into god-head. The word devordayiovia tells its 
own tale, but the thing itself was born long before it was baptized. 

Arguments drawn from the use of the word decvdapovia by 
particular authors are of necessity vague and somewhat unsatis- 
factory ; the use of the word depends much on the attitude of 
mind of the writer. Xenophon* for example uses devordatpovia in 
a good sense, as of a bracing confidence rather than a degrading 
fear. ‘The more men are god-fearing, spirit-fearing (devcvdaipoves), 
the less do they fear man.’ It would be impossible to deduce from 
such a statement anything as to the existence of a lower and 
more ‘ fearful’ stratum of religion. 

Fortunately however we have evidence, drawn not from the 
terminology of religion, but from the certain facts of ritual, 
evidence which shews beyond the possibility of doubt that the ~ 
Greeks of the classical period recognised two different classes of 
rites, one of the nature of ‘service’ addressed to the Olympians, 
the other of the nature of ‘riddance’ or ‘aversion’ addressed to an 
order of beings wholly alien. It is this second class of rites which 
haunts the mind of Plutarch in his protest against the ‘fear of 
spirits’; it is to this second class of rites that the ‘Superstitious 
Man’ of Theophrastos was unduly addicted; and this second class of 
rites, which we are apt to regard as merely decadent, superstitious, 
and as such unworthy of more than a passing notice and condemna- 
tion, is primitive and lies at the very root and base of Greek 
religion. 


1 Xen. Cyropaed. 11. 8. 58. 





— 





8 Olympian and Chthonice Ritual [ CH. 

First it must clearly be established that the Greeks themselves 
recognised two diverse elements in the ritual of their state. The 
evidence of the orator Isocrates? on this point is indefeasible. He 
is extolling the mildness and humanity of the Greeks. In this 
respect they are, he points out, ‘like the better sort of gods.’ 
‘Some of the gods are mild and humane, others harsh and un- 
pleasant.’ He then goes on to make a significant statement: 
‘Those of the gods who are the source to us of good things have the 
title of Olympians, those whose department is that of calamities 
and punishments have harsher titles; to the first class both private 
persons and states erect altars and temples, the second is not 
worshipped either with prayers or burnt-sacrifices, but in their case 
we perform ceremonies of riddance. Had Isocrates commented 
merely on the titles of the gods, we might fairly have said that 
these titles only represent diverse aspects of the same divinities, 
that Zeus who is Maimaktes, the Raging One, is also Meilichios, 
Easy-to-be-Intreated, a god of vengeance and a god of love. But 


| happily Isocrates is more explicit; he states that the two classes 


of gods have not only diverse natures but definitely different rituals, 
and that these rituals not only vary for the individual but are also 
different by the definite prescription of the state. The ritual of 
the gods called Olympian is of burnt-sacrifice and prayer, it is con- 
ducted in temples and on altars: the ritual of the other class has 
neither burnt-sacrifice nor prayer nor, it would seem, temple or 
altar, but consists in ceremonies apparently familiar to the Greek 
under the name of azrovop7rat, ‘ sendings away.’ 

For azoropu7rai the English language has no convenient word. 
Our religion still countenances the fear of the supernatural, but we 
have outgrown the stage in which we perform definite ceremonies 
to rid ourselves of the gods. Our nearest equivalent to a@romoutrai 
is ‘exorcisms, but as the word has connotations of magic and 
degraded superstition I prefer to use the somewhat awkward term 
‘ceremonies of riddance.’ 

Plato more than once refers to these ceremonies of riddance. 
In the Laws’ he bids the citizen, if some prompting intolerably 
base occur to his mind, as e.g. the desire to commit sacrilege, 

1 Isocr. Or. v. 117. 
* Plat. Legg. 854 B We éml ras drodioroumpoes, Ur emt Oedy amorporalwy lepa 


ixérns...7as 6€ trav Kax&v Ewovolas pedye dmeracrperti. 


q . | Ritual of Aversion 9 


‘betake yourself to ceremonies of riddance, go as suppliant to the 
shrines of the gods of aversion, fly from the company of wicked 
men without turning back.’ The reference to a peculiar set of 
rites presided over by special gods is clear. These gods were 
variously called azrotpomacoe and azroroptraion, the gods of Aver- 
sion and of Sending-away. 

Harpocration! tells us that Apollodorus devoted the sixth book 
of his treatise Concerning the gods to the discussion of the @eo 
atrorrourato., the gods of Sending-away. The loss of this treatise 
is a grave one for the history of ritual, but scattered notices enable 
us to see in broad outline what the character of these gods of 
Aversion was. Pausanias? at Titane saw an altar, and in front of 
it a barrow erected to the hero Epopeus, and ‘near to the tomb,’ 
he says, ‘are the gods of Aversion, beside whom are performed the 
ceremonies which the Greeks observe for the averting of evils.’ 
Here it is at least probable, though from the vagueness of the 
statement of Pausanias not certain, that the ceremonies were of an 
underworld character such as it will be seen were performed at 
the graves of heroes. The gods of Aversion by the time of 
Pausanias, and probably long before, were regarded as gods who 
presided over the aversion of evil; there is little doubt that to 
begin with these gods were the very evil men sought to avert. The 
domain of the spirits of the underworld was confined to things 
evil. Babrius? tells us that in the courtyard of a pious man there 
was a precinct of a hero, and the pious man was wont to sacrifice 
and pour libations to the hero, and pray to him for a return for his 
hospitality. But the ghost of the dead hero knew better; only the 
regular Olympians are the givers of good, his province as a hero 
was limited to evil only. He appeared in the middle of the night 
and expounded to the pious man this truly Olympian theology : 

‘Good Sir, no hero may give aught of good; 


For that pray to the gods. We are the givers 
Of all things evil that exist for men.’ 


It will be seen, when we come to the subject of hero-worship, that 
this is a very one-sided view of the activity of heroes. Still 
it remains, broadly speaking, true that dead men and the powers 
of the underworld were the objects of fear rather than love, their 
cult was of ‘aversion’ rather than ‘ tendance.’ 


1 Harpocrat. s.v. dromoumds. 2 errew lilt. 3 Babr. Fab. 63. 


10° Olympian and Chthonie Ritual om 


A like distinction is drawn by Hippocrates’ between the 
attributes, spheres and ritual of Olympian and chthonic divinities. 
He says: ‘we ought to pray to the gods, for good things to Helios, 
to Zeus Ouranios, to Zeus Ktesias, to Athene Ktesia, to Hermes, to 
Apollo; but in the case of things that are the reverse we must pray 
to Earth and the heroes, that all hostile things may be averted.’ 

It is clear then that Greek religion contained two diverse, even 
opposite, factors: on the one hand the element of service (@eparreia), 
on the other the element of aversion* (atotpo7n). The rites of 
service were connected by ancient tradition with the Olympians, or as 
they are sometimes called the Ouranians: the rites of aversion with 
ghosts, heroes, underworld divinities. The rites of service were of 
a cheerful and rational character, the rites of aversion gloomy 
and tending to superstition. The particular characteristics of 
each set of rites will be discussed more in detail later; for the 
present it is sufficient to have established the fact that Greek 
religion for all its superficial serenity had within it and beneath it 
elements of a darker and deeper significance. 

So far we have been content with the general statements of 
Greek writers as to the nature of their national religion, and the 
evidence of these writers has been remarkably clear. But, in . 
order to form any really just estimate, it is necessary to examine in 
detail the actual ritual of some at least of the national festivals. 
To such an examination the next three chapters will be devoted. 


The main result of such an examination, a result which for 
clearness’ sake may be stated at the outset, is surprising. We shall 
find a series of festivals which are nominally connected with, or as 
the handbooks say, ‘ celebrated in honour of’ various Olympians ; 
the Diasia in honour of Zeus, the Thargelia of Apollo and 
Artemis, the Anthesteria of Dionysos. The service of these 
Olympians we should expect to be of the nature of joyous 
‘tendance.’ To our surprise, when the actual rites are examined, 

1 Hippocer. repli évurviwy 639 éml dé rotow évavrloww Kal yh Kal jpwow dmrorpdmraa 
yevéoOar ra Xaerd mwavra. 

_.” English has no convenient equivalent for dmrorpomr}, which may mean 
either turning ourselves away from the thing or turning the thing away from us. 
Aversion, which for lack of a better word I have been obliged to adopt, has too 
much personal and no ritual connotation. Exorcism is nearer, but too limited and 
explicit. Dr Oldenberg in apparent unconsciousness of @eparela and drorpor} uses 


in conjunction the two words Cultus and Abwehr. To his book, Die Religion 
des Veda, though he hardly touches on Greek matters, I owe much. 






- Ritual of Olympians Mn 


we shall find that they have little or nothing to do with the 
particular Olympian to whom they are supposed to be addressed ; 
that they are rites not in the main of burnt-sacrifice, of joy and 
feasting and agonistic contests, but rites of a gloomy underworld 
character, connected mainly with purification and the worship of 
ghosts. The conclusion is almost forced upon us that we have here a 
theological stratification, that the rites of the Olympians have been 
superimposed on another order of worship. The contrast between 
the two classes of rites is so marked, so sharp, that the unbroken 
development from one to the other is felt to be almost impossible. 

To make this clear, before we examine a series of festivals in 
regular calendar order, one typical case will be taken, the Diasia, 
the supposed festival of Zeus; and to make the argument in- 
telligible, before the Diasia is examined, a word must be said as to 
the regular ritual of this particular Olympian. The ritual of the 
several Olympian deities does not vary in essentials; an instance 
of sacrifice to Zeus is selected because we are about to examine 
the Diasia, a festival of Zeus, and thereby uniformity is secured. 

Agamemnon’, beguiled by Zeus in a dream, is about to go forth 
to battle. Zeus intends to play him false, but all the same he 
accepts the sacrifice. It is a clear instance of do ut des. 

The first act is of prayer and the scattering of barley grains; 
the victim, a bull, is present but not yet slain : 


‘They gathered round the bull and straight the barley grain did take, 
And ’mid them Agamemnon stood and prayed, and thus he spake: 

O Zeus most great, most glorious, Thou who dwellest in the sky 

And storm-black cloud, oh grant the dark of evening come not nigh 
At sunset ere I blast the house of Priam to black ash, 

And burn his doorways with fierce fire, and with my sword-blade gash 
His doublet upon Hector’s breast, his comrades many a one 

Grant that they bite the dust of earth ere yet the day be done.’ 


Next follows the slayig and elaborate carving of the bull for 
the banquet of gods and men: 


’ When they had scattered barley grain and thus their prayer had made, 
The bull’s head backward drew they, and slew him, and they flayed 

_ His body and cut slices from the thighs, and these in fat 
They wrapped and made a double fold, and gobbets raw thereat 
They laid and these they burnt straightway with leafless billets dry 
And held the spitted vitals Hephaistos’ flame anigh— 
The thighs they burnt; the spitted vitals next they taste, anon 
The rest they slice and heedfully they roast till all is done— 
When they had rested from their task and all the banquet dight, 
They feasted, in their hearts no stint of feasting and delight.’ 


1 Hom. /l. m. 421. 


— arr. = 


12 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual | [CH. 


- 





Dr Leaf? observes on the passage: ‘The significance of the 
various acts of the sacrifice evidently refers to a supposed invitation: 
to the gods to take part in a banquet. Barley meal is scattered 
on the victim’s head that the gods may share in the fruits of the 
earth as well as in the meat. Slices from the thigh as the best 
part are wrapped in fat to make them burn and thus ascend in 
sweet savour to heaven. The sacrificers after roasting the vitals 
taste them as a symbolical sign that they are actually eating with 
the gods. When this religious act has been done, the rest of the 
victim is consumed as a merely human meal.’ 

Nothing could be simpler, clearer. There is no mystic com- 
munion, no eating of the body of the god incarnate in the victim, 
no awful taboo upon what has been offered to, made over to, the gods, 
no holocaust. Homer knows of victims slain to revive by their 
blood the ghosts of those below, knows of victims on which oaths 
have been taken and which are utterly consumed and abolished, but 
the normal service of the Olympians is a meal shared. The god is 
Ouranios, so his share is burnt, and the object of the burning is 
manifestly sublimation not destruction. 

With the burnt-sacrifice and the joyous banquet in our minds 
we turn to the supposed festival of Zeus at Athens and mark the 
contrast, a contrast it will be seen so great that it compels us to 
suppose that the ritual of the festival of the Diasia had primarily 
nothing whatever to do with the worship of Olympian Zeus. 


THE DIASIA. 


Our investigation begins with a festival which at first sight 
seems of all others for our purpose most unpromising, the Diasia’. 
Pollux, in his chapter*® on ‘ Festivals which take their names from 


1 Companion to the Iliad, p. 77. I have advisedly translated o'Aoxv7ac by barley 
grain, not meal, because I believe the ovAox’rac to be a primitive survival of the 
custom of offering actual grain, but this disputed question is here irrelevant. 
I follow Dr H. von Fritze, Hermes xxxu. 1897, p. 236. 

* The sources for the Diasia are all collected in the useful and so far as I am 
aware complete work, Oskar Band, Die Attischen Diasien—ein Beitrag zur Grie- 
chischen Horteologie, Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum Programm der Victoriaschule, 
Ostern 1883 (Berlin). Many of the more important sources are easily accessible 
in Mr Farnell’s Cults of the Greek States, vol. 1. pp. 171, 172. Mr Farnell regards 
Zeus Meilichios as merely a form of the Olympian Zeus, not as a contaminatio 
of two primarily distinct religious conceptions. 

* On. 1. 87. 


4 


| T] , The Diasia Le, 13 


tm a% 


the divinities worshipped,’ cites the Diasia as an instance-—‘the 
Mouseia are from the Muses, the Hermaia from Hermes, the 
Diasia and Pandia from Zeus (Avs), the Panathenaia from 
Athene.’ What could be clearer? It is true that the modern 
philologist observes what naturally escaped the attention of 
Pollux, 1.e. that the 2 in Diasia is long, that in Avos short, but 
what is the quantity of a vowel as against the accredited worship 
of an Olympian ? 

To the question of derivation it will be necessary to return 
later, the nature of the cult must first be examined. Again at the 
outset facts seem against us. It must frankly be owned that as 
early as the middle of the seventh century B.c. in common as well 
as professional parlance, the Diasia was a.festival of Zeus, of 
Zeus with the title Meilichios. 

Our first notice of the Diasia comes to us in a bit of religious 
history as amusing as it is instructive, the story of the unworthy 
trick played by the Delphic oracle on Cylon. Thucydides? tells 
how Cylon took counsel of the oracle how he might seize the 
Acropolis, and the priestess made answer that he should attempt 
it ‘on the greatest festival of Zeus.’ Cylon never doubted that 
‘the greatest festival of Zeus’ was the Olympian festival, and 
having been (8.c. 640) an Olympian victor himself, he felt that 
there was about the oracle ‘a certain appropriateness.’ But in 
fine oracular fashion the god had laid a trap for the unwary 
egotist, intending all the while not the Olympian festival but the 
Attic Diasia, ‘for, Thucydides explains, ‘the Athenians too have 
what is called the Diasia, the greatest festival of Zeus, of Zeus 
Meilichios. The passage is of paramount importance because it 
shows clearly that the obscurity lay in the intentional omission by 
the priestess of the cultus epithet Meilichios, and in that epithet 
as will be presently seen lies the whole significance of the cult. 
Had Zeus Meilichios been named no normal Athenian would have 
blundered. 

Thucydides goes on to note some particulars of the ritual 
of the Diasia; the ceremonies took place outside the citadel, 


1 Thucyd. 1. 126 éore yap Kai "A@nvaios Acaowa & Kadetrac Avds éoprh Mewdixlov 
peylotn, tw THs modews ev 7 Tavdnuel Ovovor modda ox iepeia GAN <ayva> Ovuara 
emi Wpua. 

Schol. ad loc. @iuata> twa wéupara els (Qwy woppas TeTUTWpEVA EOvOr. 










wv 


ere offered by the whole people collectively, and many 


: x ordance with local custom. The word (epe?a, the regular ritual 
term for animal sacrifices, is here opposed to Ovuata érvyepia, 
local sacrifices. But for the Scholiast the meaning of ‘local 
sacrifices’ would have remained dubious; he explains, and no doubt 
rightly, that these customary ‘local sacrifices’ were cakes made in 
the shape of animals.. The principle in sacris simulata pro vers 
accipt was and is still of wide application, and as there is nothing 
in it specially characteristic of the Diasia it need not be further 
exemplified. 

Two notices of the Diasia in the Clouds of Aristophanes? yield 
nothing. The fact that Strepsiades bought a little cart at the 
Diasia for his boy or even cooked a sausage for his relations is of 
no significance. Wherever any sort of religious ceremony goes on, 
there among primitive peoples a fair will be set up and outlying 
relations will come in and must be fed, nor does it concern us to 
decide whether the cart bought by Strepsiades was a real cart or 
as the Scholiast suggests a cake-cart. Cakes in every conceivable 
form belong to the common fund of quod semper quod ubique. 
Of capital importance however is the notice of the Scholiast on 
line 408 where the exact date of the Diasia is given. It was 
celebrated on the 8th day of the last decade of the month 
Anthesterion—-Le. about the 14th of March. The Diasia was a 
Spring festival and therein as will be shown later (p. 52) lies its 
true significance. 

From Lucian we learn that by his time the Diasia had fallen 
somewhat into abeyance ; in the Jcaro-Menippos Zeus complains 
that his altars are as cold as the syllogisms of Chrysippos. Worn 
out old god as he was, men thought it sufficient if they sacrificed 
every six years at Olympia. ‘Why is it,’ he asks ruefully, ‘ that for 
so many years the Athenians have left out the Diasia?’ It is sig- 
nificant that here again, as in the case of Cylon, the Olympian 
Zeus has tended to efface from men’s mind the ritual of him who 
bore the title Meilichios. The Scholiast* feels that some explana- 
tion of an obsolete festival is desirable, and explains: ‘the Diasia, 

' vv. 864 and 408. 


* Lue. Iearo-Menip, 24 schol. ad loc. Actova éopri)’AOhynow, Hv éwerédouw mera 
* twos aruyvorntos, Oiovres év abry At Mecdexly. 


Pa 


ympian and Chthonic Ritual [cm 


an sacrificed offered not animal sacrifices but offerings 


1] mer = Phe: Diasia 15 


a festival at Athens, which they keep with a certain element of 
chilly gloom (etvyvorns), offering sacrifices to Zeus Meilichios.’ 
This ‘chilly gloom’ arrests attention at once. What has Zeus 
of the high heaven, of the upper air, to do with ‘chilly gloom, 
with things abhorrent and abominable? Styx is the chill cold 
water of death, Hades and the Erinyes are ‘chilly ones’ (oTuyepot), 
the epithet is utterly aloof from Zeus. The Scholiast implies that 
the ‘chilly gloom’ comes in from the sacrifice to Zeus Meilichios. 
Zeus qua Zeus gives no clue, it remains to examine the title 
Meilichios. 

Xenophon in returning from his Asiatic expedition was hin- 
dered, we are told’, by lack of funds. He piously consulted a 
religious specialist and was informed that ‘Zeus Meilichios’ stood 
in his way and that he must sacrifice to the god as he was wont 
to do at home. Accordingly on the following day Xenophon 
‘sacrificed and offered a holocaust of pigs in accordance with 
ancestral custom and the omens were favourable.’ 

The regular ancestral ritual to Zeus Meilichios was a holocaust 
of pigs, and the god himself was regarded as a source of wealth, 
a sort of Ploutos. Taken by itself this last pomt could not be 
pressed, as probably by Xenophon’s time men would pray to Zeus 
pure and simple for anything and everything; taken in conjunction 
with the holocaust and the title Meilichios, the fact, 1t will pre- 
sently be seen, is significant. There is of course nothing to prove 
that Xenophon sacrificed at the time of the Diasia, though this 
is possible; we are concerned now with the cult of Zeus Meilichios 
in general, not with the particular festival of the Diasia. It may 
be noted that the Scholiast, on the passage of Thucydides already 
discussed, says that the ‘animal sacrifices’ at the Diasia were 
mpoS8ata, a word usually rendered ‘sheep’; but if he is basing 
his statement on any earlier authority mpoBata may quite well 
have meant pig or any four-legged household animal; the meaning 
of the word was only gradually narrowed down to ‘sheep.’ 

It may be said once for all that the exact animal sacrificed is 
not of the first importance in determining the nature of the god. 
Pigs came to be associated with Demeter and the underworld 


1 Xen. Anab. vu. 8.4 77 dé torepaia 6 Zevopav...€0vero Kai wroKavrer xolpous TH 
TaTpew vouw Kal éxaddépe. The incident probably took place in February, the 
mont b of the Diasia. . See Mr H. G. Dakyns, Xen. vol. 1. p, 315, 


ieee?) <* 





do Te 


16° Olympian and Chthonie Ritual [ CH. 


divinities, but that is because these divinities belong to a primitive 
stratum, and the pig then as now was cheap to rear and a stand- 
by to the poor. The animal sacrificed is significant of the status 
of the worshipper rather than of the content of the god. The 
argument from the pig must not be pressed, though undoubtedly 
the cheap pig as a sacrifice to Zeus is exceptional. 

The manner of the sacrifice, not the material, is the real clue 
to the significance of the title Meilichios. Zeus as Meilichios de- 
manded a holocaust, a whole burnt-offering. The Zeus of Homer 
demanded and received the tit-bits of the victim, though even 
these in token of friendly communion were shared by the wor- 
shippers. Such was the custom of the Ouranioi, the Olympians 
in general. Zeus Meilichios will have all or nothing. His saeri- 
fice is not a happy common feast, it 1s a dread renunciation to a 
dreadful power, hence the atmosphere of ‘chilly gloom.’ It will 
later be seen that these wn-eaten sacrifices are characteristic of 
angry ghosts demanding placation and of a whole class of under- 
world divinities in general, divinities who belong to a stratum of 
thought more primitive than Homer. For the present it is enough 
to mark that the service of Zeus Meilichios is wholly alien to that 
of the Zeus of Homer. The next passage makes still clearer the 
nature of this service. 

Most fortunately for us Pausanias, when at Myonia in Loeris, 
visited! a sanctuary, not indeed of Zeus Meilichios, but of ‘the 
Meilichians.’ He saw there no temple, only a grove and an altar, 
and he learnt the nature of the ritual. ‘The sacrifices to “the 
Meilichians” are at night-time and it is customary to consume the 
flesh on the spot before the sun is up. Here is no question of 
Zeus; we have independent divinities worshipped on their own 
account and with nocturnal ceremonies. The suspicion begins to 
take shape that Zeus must have taken over the worship of these 
dread Meilichian divinities with its nocturnal ceremonial. The 
suspicion is confirmed when we find that Zeus Meilichios is, like 
the Erinyes, the avenger of kindred blood. Pausanias? saw near 
the Kephissos ‘an ancient altar of Zeus Meilichios; on it Theseus 
received purification from the descendants of Phytalos after he 
had slain among other robbers Sinis who was related to himself 
through Pittheus.’ 

2 Pax, B88: BAR. Taithtsy the 


(0 tr oer —— i) CE ee he ee 


aie | The Diasia 17 


Again Pausanias? tells us that, after an internecine fray, the” 
Argives took measures to purify themselves from the guilt of 
kindred blood, and one measure was that they set up an image of 
Zeus Meilichios. Meilichios, Easy-to-be-entreated, the Gentle, the 
Gracious One, is naturally the divinity of purification, but he is 
also naturally the other euphemistic face of Maimaktes, he who 
rages eager, panting and thirsting for blood. This Hesychius? 
tells us in an instructive gloss. Maimaktes-Meilichios is double- 
faced like the Erinyes-Eumenides. Such undoubtedly would have 
been the explanation of the worship of Zeus Meilichios by any 
educated Greek of the fifth century B.c. with his monotheistic 
tendencies. Zeus he would have said is all in all, Zeus Meilichios , 
is Zeus in his underworld aspect—Zeus-Hades. ; 

Pausanias? saw at Corinth three images of Zeus, all under the 
open sky. One he says had no title, another was called He of 
the underworld (y@omos), the third The Highest. What earlier 
cults this triple Zeus had absorbed into himself it is impossible 
to say. 

Such a determined monotheism is obviously no primitive con- 
ception, and it is interesting to ask on what facts and fusion of 
facts it was primarily based. Happily where literature and even 
ritual leave us with suspicions only, art compels a clearer defi- 
nition. 

The two reliefs in figs. 1 and 2 were found at the Peiraeus 
and are now in the Berlin Museum’ From the inscription 
on the relief in fig. 1 and from numerous other inscribed reliefs 
found with it, it is practically certain that at the place in 
which they were found Zeus Meilichios was worshipped. In any 
ease the relief in fig. 1 is clearly dedicated to him. Above the 
splendid coiled beast is plainly inscribed ‘to Zeus Meilichios’ 


1 Prea0: 1. 2 Hesych. s.v. Macuwaxrys’ merdixvos, Kabdpovos. 

Sie PS 

4 Permission to republish the two reliefs figured here and that in fig. 5 
has been courteously granted me by Professor Kekulé von Stradowitz, Director 
of the Berlin Museum, and I owe to his kindness the excellent photographs 
from which the reproductions are made. From the official catalogue (Beschreibung 
der Antiken Skulpturen in Berlin) I quote the following particulars as to material, 
provenance &c. 

1. Cat. 722, H. 0°58, Br. 0°31. Hymettus marble found with No. 723 at the Zea 
harbour not far from Ziller’s house. Taken to Berlin 1879. Inscribed AII 
MEIAIXIQI. Date fourth century p.c., see CIA. u. 3, 1581, cf. CIA. 11. 3. 1578, 
1582, 1583. 

2. Cat. 723, material, provenance, date, same as 722. 


bo 


H. 


18 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual 


(Avi Meitexyéw). We are brought face to face with the astounding 
fact that Zeus, father of gods and men, is figured by his wor- 
shippers as a snake. 





Fie. 1. 


So astonishing is the inscription that it drove a man of 
M. Foucart’s learning and ability into strange straits. He was the 
first to attempt the interpretation of these remarkable reliefs, and 
so determined is he that the Hellenic Zeus is not, cannot be, a 
mere snake that he resorts to the perfectly gratuitous assumption 
that Meilichios is Moloch (Melek) and that the reliefs are dedicated 
by foreigners to their foreign god’. We have no evidence that 
Moloch was figured as a snake, but anything is good enough for a 
foreigner. This explanation, though supported by a great name, 


1 Bull. de Corr. Hell. yu. p. 507. 





1] The Diasia 19 


was too preposterous long to command attention and another way 
was sought out of the difficulty. The snake, it was suggested, 
was not the god himself, it was his attribute. Again the assump- 
tion is baseless. Zeus is one of the few Greek gods who never 
appear attended by a snake. Asklepios, Hermes, Apollo, even 
Demeter and Athene have their snakes, Zeus never. Moreover 
when the god developed from snake form to human form, as, it 
will later be shown, was the case with Asklepios, the snake he 
once was remains coiled about his staff or attendant at his throne. 
In the case of Zeus Meilichios in human form the snake he once was 
not disappears clean and clear. 

The explanation of the snake as merely an attribute is indeed 
impossible to any unbiassed 
eritic who looks at the relief 
in fig. 2. Here clearly the 
snake is the object wor- 
shipped by the woman and 
two men who approach with 
gestures of adoration. The 
colossal size of the beast as 
it towers above its human 
adorers is the Magnificat of 
the artist echoed by the wor- 
shippers. When we confront 
the relief in fig. 3, also found 
at the Peiraeus, with those 
in figs. 1 and 2, the secret 
is out at last. In fig. 3 a 
man followed by a woman 
and child approaches an altar, 
behind which is seated a 
bearded god holding asceptre 
and  patera for libation. Fie. 2. 

Above is clearly inscribed 

‘ Aristarche to Zeus Meilichios’ (Apectapyn Avi Mevrrxiw). And 

the truth is nothing more or less than this. The human-shaped 

Zeus has slipped himself quietly into the place of the old snake- 

god. Art sets plainly forth what has been dimly shadowed in 

ritual and mythology. It is not that Zeus the Olympian has 
9-2 


eed 





20 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual [ CH. 


‘an underworld aspect’; it is the cruder fact that he of the upper 
air, of the thunder and lightning, extrudes an ancient serpent- 





Fie. -3. 


demon of the lower world, Meilichios. Meilichios is no foreign 
Moloch, he is home-grown, autochthonous before the formulation 
of Zeus. 

How the shift may have been effected art again helps us to 
conjecture. In the same sanctuary 
at the Peiraeus that yielded the 
reliefs in figs. 1 and 2 was found 
the inscribed relief? in fig. 4. We 
have a similar bearded snake and 





HPAKA EIAH ETANIO EQ] 


above is inscribed ‘ Heracleides to 
the god.’ The worshipper is not 
fencing, uncertain whether he 
means Meilichios or Zeus; he 
brings his offermg to the local 
precinct where the god is a snake 
and dedicates it to the god, the 
god of that precinct. It is not 
monotheism, rather it is parochial- 
ism, but it is a conception tending 
towards a later monotheism. 
When and where the snake is Fia. 4. 
simply ‘the god,’ the fusion with 

Zeus is made easy. 


1 Bull, de Corr. Hell, 1883, p. 510, 





The Diasia 21 


- 


_ In fig. 5 is figured advisedly a monument of snake worship, 
which it must be distinctly noted comes, not from the precinct 
of Zeus Meilichios at the Peiraeus, but from Eteonos in Boeotia. 





Fie. 5. 


“When we come to the discussion of hero-worship, it will be seen 
that all over Greece the dead hero was worshipped in snake form 
and addressed by euphemistic titles akin to that of Meilichios. 
The relief from Boeotia is a good instance of such worship and is 
chosen because of the striking parallelism of its art type with that 
of the Peiraeus relief in fig. 3. The maker of this class of 
votive reliefs seems to have kept in stock designs of groups of 
pious worshippers which he could modify as required and to 
which the necessary god or snake and the appropriate victim 
could easily be appended. Midway in conception between the 
Olympian Zeus with his sceptre and the snake demon stands 
another relief? (fig. 6), also from the Peiraeus sanctuary. Meilichios 
is human, a snake no longer, but he is an earth god, he bears the 
cornucopia, his victim is the pig. He is that Meilichios to whom 
Xenophon offered the holocaust of pigs, praying for wealth; he 
is also the Zeus-Hades of Euripides. We might have been 
tempted to call him simply Hades or Ploutos but for the inscrip- 
tion [Kpito]Born Aci Meiduyiw, ‘ Kritoboule to Zeus Meilichios,’ 
which makes the dedication certain. 


1 From a photograph (Peiraeus 12) published by kind permission of the German 
Archaeological Institute, see Eph. Arch. 1886, p. 47. 


Y Yayt V y0-95 
: d ) ne ; 
aah. Swartinn Qin wUA9e A 


* oe i= 


fh Apa AS . 
vs¥ at il to 


— 


22 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual ' [CH. 


By the light then of these reliefs the duality, the inner 
discrepancy of Zeus Meilichios admits of a simple and straight- 
forward solution. It is the monument of a superposition of cults. 


= 1. es are m av Oh eat 
i R a 
seer’ ¥ https Se 


SO bs scar as ve Ue Ji rt Tony cee inl 
myer ES fe CR EEAS FAs y4t 


y 





Fie. 6. 


But the difficulty of the name of the festival, Diasia, remains. 
There is no reason to suppose that the name was given late; and, 
if primitive, how can we sever it from Avog? 

It is interesting to note that the ancients themselves were not 
quite at ease in deriving Diasia from Avds. Naturally they were 
not troubled by difficulties as to long and short vowels, but they 
had their misgivings as to the connotation of the word, and they 
try round uneasily for etymologies of quite other significance. 
The Scholiast on Lucian’s Zimon* says the word is probably 
derived from dsacaivew ‘to fawn on, ‘to propitiate.’ Suidas? 
says it comes from dvapuyeiy avtods evyais Tas doas, because in 
the Diasia ‘men escaped from curses by prayers.’ If etymologi- 
cally absurd, certainly, as will be seen, a happy guess. 

Such derivations are of course only worth citing to show that 
even in ancient minds as regards the derivation of Diasia from 
Avos misgiving lurked. 

The misgiving is emphasized by the modern philologist. The 
derivation of Diasia with its long from Avos with its short 7 is 
scientifically improbable if not impossible. Happily another 


1 Lucian, Tim. c. 7. 2 Suidas s.v. Acdoua. 


: 


rey 


1] The Dian Fleece 23 


derivation that at least satisfies scientific conditions has been 
suggested by Mr R. A. Neil. Not only does it satisfy scientific 
conditions but it also confirms the view arrived at by independent 
investigation of the ritual and art representations of Zeus 
Meilichios. Mr Neil! suggests that in several Greek words show- 
ing the stem ovo this stem may stand by the regular falling away 
of the medial o for Sico and is identical with the Latin diro’. 
dirus, he notes, was originally a purely religious word. Such 
words would be the Diasia, whatever the termination may be, the 
Ata of Teos (p. 143) and perhaps the Havéva of Athens. Seen in 
the light of this new etymology the Diasia becomes intelligible: it 
is the festival of curses, imprecations : it is nocturnal and associated 
with rites of placation and purgation, two notions next al 
linked in the mind of the ancients. 

We further understand why Meilichios seems the male double 
of Erinys and why his rites are associated with ‘chilly gloom.’ 
The Diasia.,has primarily and necessarily nothing to do with Avos, 
with Zeus; it has everything to do with ‘dirae,’ magical curses, 
exorcisms and the like. The keynote of primitive ritual, it will 
become increasingly clear, is exorcism. 

In the light of this new derivation it is possible further to 
explain another element in the cult of Zeus Meilichios hitherto 
purposely left unnoticed, the famous Avos xce&diov, the supposed 
‘fleece of Zeus.’ The Ads «@éd.ov is, I think, no more the fleece 
of Zeus than the Diasia is his festival. 

Polemon, writing at the beginning of the second century B.C., 
undoubtedly accepted the current derivation, and on the statement 
of Polemon most of our notices of ‘the fleece of Zeus’ appear to 
be based. Hesychius* writes thus: ‘The fleece of Zeus: they use 


1 J.H.S. xx. p. 114, note 1. 

2 Mr P. Giles kindly tells me that a rare Sanskrit word dveshas meaning ‘ hate’ 
and the like exists and phonetically would nearly correspond to the Latin dirus. 
The corresponding form in Greek would appear as de.os, unless in late Greek. But 
from the end of the 5th century B.c. onwards the pronunciation would be the same 
as 600s, and if the word survived only in ritual terms it would naturally be confused 
with dtos. Almost all authorities on Latin however regard the ru in dirus as a suffix 
containing an original r as in mirus, durus ete. This view, which would be fatal 
to the etymology of dirus proposed in the text, seems supported by a statement of 
Servius (if the statement be accurate) on den, m1. 235 ‘Sabini et Umbri quae nos 
mala dira appellant,’ as, though s between vowels passes in Latin and Umbrian 
into 7, ii remains an s sound in Sabine. 

3 Hesych. s.v. 6 6€ loAduwv 76 €x Tod Au reOupévov iepetov. From Athenaeus also 
we learn that Polemon had treated in some detail of the ‘ fleece of Zeus’; Athenaeus 
says (x1. § 478 c), IloAguwy 5 ev T@ mepi Tod Siov Kwoiou Pyct... 


rg es 


oe} 


24 com —Olympian‘and Chthonic Ritual [cH. 


this expression when the victim has been sacrificed to Zeus, and 
those who were being pufified stood on it with their left foot. 
Some say it means a great and perfect fleece. But Polemon says 
it is the fleece of the victim sacrificed to Zeus.’ 

But Polemon is by no means infallible in the matter of 
etymology, though invaluable as reflecting the current impression 
of his day. Our conviction that the Avds «edvov is necessarily 
‘the fleece of Zeus’ is somewhat loosened when we find that this 
fleece was by no means confined to the ritual of Zeus, and in so far 
as it was connected with Zeus, was used in the ritual only of a Zeus 
who bore the titles Meilichios and Ktesios. Suidas* expressly 
states that ‘they sacrifice to Meilichios and to Zeus Ktesios and 
they keep the fleeces of these (victims) and call them “Dian,” and 
they use them when they send out the procession in the month of 
Skirophorion, and the Dadouchos at Eleusis uses them, and others 
use them for purifications by strewing them under the feet of those 
who are polluted.’ . 

It is abundantly clear that Zeus had no monopoly in the fleece 
supposed to be his; ft was a sacred fleece used for purification 
ceremonies in general. He himself had taken over the cult of 

. . . ‘ . . . . . 
Meilichios, the Placable One, the spirit of purification ; we conjec- 
ture that he had also taken over the fleece of purification. 

Final conviction comes from a passage in the commentary of 
Eustathius? on the purification of the house of Odysseus after the 

1 Suidas s.v. Qvouvcl re TO TE Mewdiylw wal 7T@ Krnolw Aci, ra 5€ Kddia TovTwr 
pudrdooovat kai Aia (dia) rporayopevovrat, xpavrat 5 abrots ol re Dxipopoplwv rHy tommny 
aréXovTes Kal 6 dadovyxos év ’“EXevotve kal GAdou Twes mpos Kabapuods brocropyivres 
ara Tots rool Tay évayov. For Ala Gaisford conjectures Avs but from the passage 
of Eustathius (see infr.) it is clear that we must read dia. 

* Kustath. ad Od. xxtr. 481 § 1934—5 éddxouv yap oi “EM nves olrw Ta Toatra 
pion kadalper Gat Stomoumovmeva. eel érepot wev dndovot Tpbrrous Kabapolwy érépous, a 
kal é&ayovres TOv olkwy mera Tas EOiwous éraodas mpocéppurrov aupddors Eumahw Ta 
mpicwmra orpépovTes Kal Eravidyres aueractrpenrl. 6 dé ye momrixos Odvaceds ovx ot Tw 
motel aN’ Erépws amrdovarepov. nal yodv" olae Oéevov ypnu Kaxwv dKos...réov moujoas 
ovdév...Aéevov d€ Ousduaros eidos kabalpew Soxoidvros Tovs uiacno’s. 610 Kal dcacreiAas 
Kkakwv dkos atré dnow 6 ronrhs, ore dé Twes évradda érwdal cuviOers Tors madatois 
oltre orevwrros ev w dvOpakes arrayomevar alr@ ayyelw épplirrovro dria Hopavias. laréov 
6€ bre ov pbvov bea delov éylvovro Kadapnol Kaba mporex@s éeypadyn adda kal murda twa 
els ToUTO Xphoyw.a Hv. dpiorepewy yoov, purov Kara Havoaviay émiTHdecov els KaBapwov’ 
kal ais d€ els roaira, éorlv ov, wapeauBdvero, ws év “Ihidde galverar. Kai ol rd 
dtomopmety dé épunvevtovrés pacw bre Slov éxddouv Kwdrov lepelou Tudévros Ak wedexlw 
év rots Kalapois, pllwovros Matuanrnprdvos unvos bre tHyovro Ta Toumata, Kal Kadapuav 
éxBodal els Tas Tpiddous éylvovro. elxov dé wera xeipas motrov * dep H mv, pacl, Knpixcov, 
aéBas Epuod. xal éx rod rovovrov moumod Kal rod pnbévros dlov rd dvorommeiy...d\\ws 
6é Kowdrepov Sioroumeivy Kal drodioroumety épalvero rd Ads ddeEiKdKou émix\hoet 


éxméumew ra pada. HKustathius passes on to speak of purification by blood and 
the pappyaxdi, see p. 95. 


es 


1] The Dian Fleece 25 


slaying of the suitors. Odysseus purges his house by two things, 
first after the slaying of the suitors by water, then after the hang- 
ing of the maidens by fire and brimstone. His method of purifying 
is a simple and natural one, it might be adopted to-day in the 
disinfecting of a polluted house. This Eustathius notes, and 
contrasts it with the complex magical apparatus in use among the 
ancients and very possibly still employed by the pagans of his 
own day. He comments as follows: ‘The Greeks thought such 
pollutions were purified by being “sent away.”..Some describe one 
sort of purifications some others, aud these purifications they carried 
out of houses after the customary incantations and they cast them 
forth in the streets with averted faces and returned without 
looking backwards. But the Odysseus of the poet does not act 
thus, but performs a different and a simpler act, for he says: 


“Bring brimstone, ancient dame, the cure of ills, and bring me fire 
That I the hall may fumigate.”’ 


In the confused fashion of his day and of his own mind 
Eustathius sees there is a real distinction but does not recognise 
wherein it lies. He does not see that Homer’s purification is actual, 
physical, rational, not magical. He goes on: ‘ Brimstone is a sort 
of incense which is reputed to cleanse pollutions. Hence the poet 
distinguishes it, calling it “cure of ills.” In this passage there are 
none of the incantations usual among the ancients, nor is there 
the small vessel in which the live coals were carried and thrown 
away vessel and all backwards.’ 

- What half occurs to Eustathius and would strike any in- 
telligent modern observer acquainted with ancient ritual is that 
the purification of the house of Odysseus is as it were scientific ; 
there is none of the apparatus of magical ‘riddance.’ Dimly and 
darkly he puts a hesitating finger on the cardinal difference 
between the- religion of Homer and that of later (and earlier) 
Greece, that Homer is innocent, save for an occasional labelled 
magician, of magic. The Archbishop seems to feel this as something 
of a defect, a shortcoming. He goes on: ‘It must be understood 
that purifications were effected not only as has just been described, 
by means of sulphur, but there are also certain plants that were 
useful for this purpose; at least according to Pausanias there 
is verbena, .a plant in use for purification, and the pig was 


26 Olympian and Chthonic Ritual fou. 


sometimes employed for such purposes, as appears in the Jliad.’ 
This mention of means of purification in general brings irre- 
sistibly to the mind of Eustathius a salient instance, the very 
fleece we are discussing. He continues: ‘Those who interpret 
the word écovrourety say that they applied the term doy to the 
fleece of the animal that had been sacrificed to Zeus Meilichios 
in purifications at the end of the month of Maimakterion? when 
they performed the Sendings and when the castings out of 
pollutions at the triple ways took place: and they held in their 
hands a sender which was they say the kerukeion, the attribute of 
Hermes, and from a sender of this sort, pompos,and from the dior, 
the fleece called “Dian,” they get the word dvo7roy7eiv, divine 
sending.’ 

From this crude and tentative etymological guessing two im- 
portant points emerge. Eustathius does not speak of the ‘ fleece 
of Zeus, but of the Dian or perhaps we may translate divine 
fleece. Sos is with him an adjective to be declined, not the genitive 
of Zevs. This loosens somewhat the connection of the fleece with 
Zeus, as the adjective dtos could be used of anything divine or even 
magical in its wonder and perfection. Further, and this is of 
supreme importance, he connects the Dian fleece with the difficult 
word dvo7rou7retv, and in this lies the clue to its real interpretation. 
‘That this, he goes on—meaning his derivation of dvo7rou7rety from 
mour7ros the kerukeion of Hermes and diov the divine fleece—‘is so 
we find from special investigation, but in more general parlance 
by dvotop7eiv and arodvoToprety is meant the sending away of 
unclean things in the name of Zeus Averter of Evil.’ Eustathius 
evidently gets nervous; his ‘ special investigation’ is leading him 
uncomfortably near the real truth, uncomfortably far from the 
orthodox Zeus, so he pulls himself up instinctively. 

The explanation of the strange word azrodioTouetv, to which 
Eustathius at the close of his remarks piously reverts, is still 
accredited by modern lexicons. azrodcorrou7retc@ar—the middle 
form is the most usual—means, we are told, ‘to avert threatened 
evils by offerings to Zeus*’ Are scholars really prepared to 
believe that dzrodvoT0p7reia Oar Means, to put it shortly, ‘to Zeus 
things away’? The lexicons after this desperate etymology proceed 


1 Maimaktes, it will be remembered, is the other face of Meilichios, see supra. 
2 See Liddell and Scott, s.v. 


* ee eae 
1] The Dian Fleece 27 


‘hence, to conjure away, to reject with abhorrence,’ and finally, 
under a heading apart, ‘ aroévoTroputreia Pat oixor to purify a house.’ 
Surely from beginning to end the meaning inherent in the word 
is simply ‘to rid of pollution’; azrodvoTowreta Gat is substantially 
the same as azo7éurewv, to send away, to get rid of, but 
this is the important part—the element dco emphasizes the means 
and method of the ‘sending. The quantity of the ¢ in dsrobu0- 
moutreiao0at we have no means of knowing, the « in Diasia the 
feast of Zeus Meilichios is long, the « in the dtov cwédcov used in 
his service is long, the doy «wédvov is used in ritual concerned with 
SvoTrouTrovpeva, Its purpose is amodsoTrouTreta Par. Is it too bold 
to see in the mysterious 6co the same root as has been seen in 
Diasia and to understand azrodé.oToptetc Oar as ‘to effect riddance 
by magical imprecation or deprecation ’ ? 

The word dirus is charged with magic, and this lives on in the 
Greek word 6dzos which is more magical than divine. It has that 
doubleness, for cursing and for blessing, that haunts all inchoate 
religious terms. The fleece is not divine in our sense, not definitely 
either for blessing or for cursing; it is taboo, it is ‘medicine,’ it 
is magical. As magical medicine it had power to purify, Le. in 
the ancient sense, not to cleanse physically or purge morally, but 
to rid of evil influences, of ghostly infection. 

Magical fleeces were of use in ceremonies apparently the most 
diverse, but at the bottom of each usage lies the same thought, 
that the skin of the victim has magical efficacy as medicine 
against impurities. Dicaearchus' tells us that at the rising 
of the dog-star, when the heat was greatest, young men in the 
flower of their age and of the noblest families went to a cave 
called the sanctuary of Zeus Aktaios, and also (very significantly 
it would seem) called the Cheironion; they were girded about 
with fresh fleeces of triple wool. Dicaearchus says that this was 
because it was so cold on the mountain; but if so, why must the 
fleeces be fresh? Zeus Aktaios, it is abundantly clear, has taken 
over the cave of the old Centaur Cheiron; the magic fleeces, newly 
slain because all ‘medicine’ must be fresh, belong to his order as 
they belonged to the order of Meilichios. | 

Again we learn that whoever would take counsel of the oracle 
of Amphiaraos* must first purify himself, and Pausanias himself 


and 





1 Dicaearch. Frg. Hist. 11. 262. 
2 P. 1, 34. 2—5. Strabo (vr. § 284) says that the Daunians when they consulted 


rit. 


28 Olympian and Chthonie Ritual [ CH. 


adds the explanatory words, ‘Sacrificing to the god is a ceremony 
of purification.’ But the purification ceremony did not, it would 
appear, end with the actual sacrifice, for he explains, ‘Having 
sacrificed a ram they spread the skin beneath them and go to 
sleep, awaiting the revelation of a dream’; here again, though the 
name is not used, we have a diov xwédvov, a magic fleece with 
purifying properties. It is curious to note that Zeus made an 
effort to take over the cult of Amphiaraos, as he had taken that of 
Meilichios ; we hear of a Zeus Amphiaraos’, but the attempt was 
not a great success; probably the local hero Amphiaraos, himself 
all but a god, was too strong for the Olympian. 


The results of our examination of the festival of the Diasia 
are then briefly this. The cult of the Olympian Zeus has over- 
laid the cult of a being called Meilichios, a being who was 
figured as a snake, who was a sort of Ploutos, but who had also 
some of the characteristics of an Erinys; he was an avenger of 
kindred blood, his sacrifice was a holocaust offered by night, his 
festival a time of ‘chilly gloom.’ A further element in his cult 
was a magical fleece used in ceremonies of purification and in the 
service of heroes. The cult of Meilichios is unlike that of the 
Olympian Zeus as described in Homer, and the methods of puri- 
fication characteristic of him wholly alien. The name of his 
festival means ‘the ceremonies of imprecation.’ 


The next step in our investigation will be to take in order 
certain well-known Athenian festivals, and examine the cere- 
monies that actually took place at each. In each case it will be 
found that, though the several festivals are ostensibly consecrated 
to various Olympians, and though there is in each an element 
of prayer and praise and sacrificial feasting such as is familiar 
to us in Homer, yet, when the ritual is closely examined, the main 
part of the ceremonies will be seen to be magical rather that what 
we should term religious. Further, this ritual is addressed, in so 
far as it is addressed to any one, not to the Olympians of the 
upper air, but to snakes and ghosts and underworld beings; its 
the oracle of the hero Calchas sacrificed a black ram to him and slept on the fleece. 
The worshippers of the ‘Syrian Goddess,’ Lucian says (De Syr. Dea 35), knelt on the 
ground and put the feet and the head of the victim on their heads. He probably 
means that they got inside the skin and wore it with the front paws tied round the 


neck as Herakles wears the lion-skin. 
1 Dicaearchus t. 6. 


~ 


Fa 
Pt The Attic Calendar 29 


main gist is purification, the riddance of evil influences, this rid- 
dance being naturally prompted not by cheerful confidence but 
by an ever imminent fear. 

In the pages that follow but little attention will be paid to 
the familiar rites of the Olympians, the burnt sacrifice and its 
attendant feast, the dance and song; our whole attention will be 
focussed on the rites belonging to the lower stratum. This course 
is adopted for two reasons. First, the rites of sacrifice as described 
by Homer are simple and familiar, needing but little elucidation 
and having already received superabundant commentary, whereas 
the rites of the lower stratum are often obscure and have met 
with little attention. Second, it is these rites of purification 
belonging to the lower stratum, primitive and barbarous, even 
repulsive as they often are, that furnished ultimately the material 
out of which ‘mysteries’ were made—mysteries which, as will be 
seen, when informed by the new spirit of the religions of Dionysos 
and Orpheus, lent to Greece its deepest and most enduring 
» religious impulse. 


ATTIC CALENDAR. . 


Notre. Names of Festivals selected for special discussion are printed in 
large type. Names of Festivals incidentally discussed in italics. 


1. Hecatombaion July, August Kronia, Panathenaia 

2. Metageitnion Aug., September Metageitnia 

3. Boedromion Sept., October Eleusinia and. Greater Mysteries 
4, Pyanepsion Oct., November THESMOPHORIA. Pyanepsia and 


Oschophoria [ Id. Oct. (Oct. 15) 
October Horse] 


5. Maimakterion Nov., December ‘Atos K@diov’ 

6. Poseideon Dec., January Haloa 

7. Gamelion Jan., February Gamelia (Lenaia ?) 

8. Anthesterion Feb., March ANTHESTERIA, D1asta, Lesser 
Mysteries [xv. Kal. Mart. (Feb. 
15) Lupercalia] [(Feb. 21) 
Feralia| 

9. Elaphebolion “March, April Dionysia 

10. _Munychion April, May Munychia, Brauronia 

ll. Thargelion May, June THarGELIA, Aallynteria, Plynteria 


(May 15 Argei, June 15 Vest- 
alia, Q. St. D. F.) 
12. Skirophorion June, July Skirophoria, Arrephoria, Dipo- 
lia, Bouphonia 
The Athenian official calendar began in the month Heca- 
tombaion (July—August) at the summer’s height. In it was 


30  — Olympian and Chthonie Ritual [cu. 


celebrated the great festival of the Panathenaia, whose very name 
marks its political import. Such political festivals, however 
magnificent and socially prominent, it is not my purpose to 
examine; concerning the gist of primitive religious conceptions 
they yield us little. The Panathenaia is sacred rather to a city 
than a goddess. Behind the Panathenaia lay the more elementary 
festival of the Kronia, which undoubtedly took its name from the 
faded divinity Kronos; but of the Kronia the details known are 
not adequate for its fruitful examination. 

A cursory glance at the other festivals noted in our list shows 
that some, though not all, gave their names to the months in which 
they were celebrated, and (a fact of high significance) shows also 
that with one exception, the Dionysia, these festivals are not 
named after Olympian or indeed after any divinities. Metageitnia, 
the festival of ‘changing your neighbours, is obviously social or 
political. The Eleusinia are named after a place, so are the 
Munychia and Brauronia. The Thesmophoria, Oschophoria, Skiro- 
phoria and Arrephoria are festivals of carrying something; the 
Anthesteria, Kallynteria, Plynteria festivals of persons who do 
something ; the Haloa a festival of threshing-floors, the Thargelia 
of first-fruits, the Bouphonia of ox-slaying, the Pyanepsia of bean- 
cooking. In the matter of nomenclature the Olympians are much 
to seek. 

The festivals in the table appended are arranged according to 
the official calendar for convenience of reference, but it should be 
noted that the agricultural year, on which the festivals primarily 
depend, begins in the autumn with sowing, Le. in Pyanepsion. The 
Greek agricultural year fell into three main divisions, the autumn 
sowing season followed by the winter, the spring with its first 
blossoming of fruits and flowers beginning in Anthesterion, and the 
early summer harvest (677wpa) beginning in Thargelion, the month 
of first-fruits; to this early harvest of grain and fruits was added 
with the coming of the vine the vintage in Boedromion, and the 
gathering in of the later fruits, e.g. the fig. All the festivals 
fall necessarily much earlier than the dates familiar to us in the 
North. In Greece to-day the wheat harvest is over by the middle 
or end of June. 

No attempt will be made to examine all the festivals, for two 
practical reasons, lack of space and lack of material; but fortunately 


qT] The Attic Calendar 31 


for us we have adequate material for the examination of one 
characteristic festival in each of the agricultural seasons, the 
Thesmophoria for autumn, the Anthesteria for spring, the Thar- 
gela for early summer, and in each case the ceremonies of the 
several seasons can be further elucidated by the examination of 
the like ceremonies in the Roman calendar. To make clear the 
superposition of the two strata!, which for convenience’ sake may 
be called Olympian and chthonic, the Diasia has already been 
examined. In the typical festivals now to be discussed a like 
superposition will be made apparent, and from the detailed 
examination of the lower chthonic stratum it will be possible 
to determine the main outlines of Greek religious thought on such 
essential points as e.g. purification and sacrifice. 

It would perhaps be more methodical to begin the investigation 
with the autumn, with the sowing festival of the Thesmophoria, 
but as the Thesmophoria leads more directly to the consum- 
mation of Greek religion in the Mysteries it will be taken last. 
The reason for this will become more apparent in the further 
course of the argument. We shall begin with the Anthesteria. 


1 As regards the ethnography of these two strata, I accept Prof. Ridgeway’s view 
that the earlier stratum, which I have called chthonic, belongs to the primitive 
population of the Mediterranean to which he gives the name Pelasgian; the later 
stratum, to which belongs the manner of sacrifice I have called ‘Olympian,’ is 
characteristic of the Achaean population coming from the North. But, as I have 
no personal competency in the matter of ethnography and as Prof. Ridgeway’s 
second volume is as yet unpublished, I have thought it best to state the argument 
as it appeared to me independently, i.e. that there are two strata in religion, one 


primitive, one later. I sought for many years an ethnographical clue to this 
stratification, but sought in vain. 


CHAPTER ILI. 


THE ANTHESTERIA. 
THE RITUAL OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES. 


OuR examination of the unpromising Diasia has so far led 
us to the following significant, if somewhat vague, results. The 
festival in all probability did not originally belong to Zeus, 
but to a being called Meilichios, a snake god or demon. The 
worship of this being was characterized by nightly ceremonies, 
holocausts which the sun might not behold, it was gloomy in 
character, potent for purification. The name of the festival is 
probably associated with dirae, curses, imprecations. 

~The Diasia, gloomy though it is, is a spring festival and its 
significance will be yet more plainly apparent if we examine 
another, the other spring festival of the Greeks, ie. the 
Anthesteria, which gives its name to the first spring month 
Anthesterion. ; 

If we know little about the Diasia, about the Anthesteria! we 
mow much. Apollodorus, quoted by Harpocration, tells us that 
the whole festival collectively was called Anthesteria, that it was 
celebrated in honour of Dionysos, and that its several parts, i.e. its 
successive days, were known as Pithoigia (cask-opening), Choes 
(cups), Chytroi (pots). The exact date of the festival is fixed, 
the three successive days fallmg from the 11th to the 13th of 
Anthesterion’. 

1 The sources for the Anthesteria are collected and discussed in the Lexicons of 
Pauly-Wissowa and of Daremberg and Saglio and more completely in Dr Martin 
Nilsson’s Studia de Dionysiis Atticis (Lundae, 1900), which has been of great 


service to me. 
* Harpocrat. s.v. 


CH. II] The Anthesteria 33 


On the first day, the 11th of Anthesterion, i.e. the Pithoigia, 
Plutarch? tells us ‘they broached the new wine at Athens. 
It was an ancient custom,’ he adds, ‘to offer some of it as a 
libation before they drank it, praying at the same time that the 
use of the drug (d@apudxov) might be rendered harmless and 
beneficial to them.’ This is a clear case of the offering of first- 
fruits’. Among his own people, the Boeotians, Plutarch adds, ‘the 
day was called the day of the Good Spirit’, the Agathos Daimon, 
and to him they made offerings. The month itself was known as 
Prostaterios.’ The scholiast to Hesiod* tells us that the festival 
was an ancestral one (€v Tots watpios), and that it was not allow- 
able to hinder either household slaves or hired servants from 
partaking of the wine. 

The casks once opened, the revel set in and lasted through 
the next day (the Choes or Cups) and on through the third 
(the Chytroi or Pots). The day of the Choes seems to have 
been the climax, and sometimes gave its name to the whole 
festival. 

It is needless to dwell on all the details of what was in intent 
a three days’ fair. A ‘Pardon’ in the Brittany of to-day affords 
perhaps the nearest modern analogy. The children have holidays, 
fairmgs are bought, friends are feasted, the sophists get their 
fees, the servants generally are disorganized, and every one down 
to the small boys, as many a vase-painting tells us, is more or less 
drunk. The drinking bore of course its ritual aspect; there is 
a drinking contest presided over by the King Archon, he who first 
drains his cup gets a cake, each man crowns his cup with a garland 
and deposits the wreath in keeping of the priestess of the 
sanctuary of Dionysos in the Marshes. On the day of the Cups 
takes place the august ceremony of the wedding of the wife of 
the King Archon to the god Dionysos. On that day alone in all 
the year the temple of Dionysos is opened’*; the wedding ceremony 
itself takes place in the Boukoleion. 

On the third day, the Chytroi or Pots, there was a dramatic 
contest known as Xutpevor, Pot-contests. During this third day 

1 Plut. Q. Symp. 111. 7. 1. 
* The gist of such offerings will be considered under the Thargelia. 
3 Plut. Q. Symp. vu. 3. 


+ Op. 368. 
> Discussed in relation to Dionysos, see infra, Chapter vrir. 


y 


' 


— ms 


34 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


the revel went on; Aristophanes’ has left us the picture of the 
drunken mob thronging the streets at the holy Pot-Feast : 
‘O brood of the mere and the spring, 
Gather together and sing 
From the depths of your throat 


By the side of the boat 
Coax, as we move in a ring. 


As in Limnae we sang the divine 
Nyseian Giver of Wine, 

When the people in lots 

With their sanctified Pots 
Came reeling around my shrine.’ 


The scholiast on the Acharnians’, a play which gives us a 
lively picture of the festival, says that the Choes and the Chytroi 
were celebrated on one day. The different days and acts of the 
whole Anthesteria were doubtless not sharply divided, and if each 
day was reckoned from sunrise to sunset confusion would easily 
arise. 


_- So far a cursory inspection clearly shows that the Anthesteria 
was a wine-festival in honour of Dionysos. Moreover we have the 
definite statement of Thucydides* that ‘the more ancient Dionysia 
were celebrated on the 12th day of the month Anthesterion in the 
temple of Dionysos in the Marshes.’ The reference can only be 
to the Choes, so that the festival of the Choes seems actually to 
have borne the name Dionysia. Harpocration* goes even further ; 
he says, quoting Apollodorus, that ‘the whole month was sacred to 
Dionysos.’ 

A more searching examination of the sources reveals beneath 
the surface rejoicings, as in the case of the Diasia, another and 
more primitive ritual, and a ritual of widely different significance. 
It has escaped no student of Greek festivals that through the 
Anthesteria there ran ‘a note of sadness. Things were not 
altogether so merry as they seemed. This has been variously 
explained, as due to the ‘natural melancholy of the spring, or 
more recently as evidence of the fact that Dionysos had his 
‘chthonic side’ and was the ‘Lord of souls” A simpler ex- 
planation hes at the door, 


1 Ar, Ran. 212, trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. 
2 Aristoph. Ach. 1076, schol. ad loc. % Thueyd. 1m. 15. 
4 Harpocrat. s.v. Xdes. 





11 The Chytrot 35 


The clue to the real gist of the Anthesteria is afforded by 
a piece of ritual performed on the last day, the Chytroi. The 
Greeks had a proverbial expression spoken, we are told, of those 
who ‘on all occasions demand a repetition of favours received.’ 
It ran as follows: ‘Out of the doors! ye Keres; it is no longer 
Anthesteria. Suidas* has preserved for us its true signification ; 
it was spoken, he says, ‘implying that in the Anthesteria the 
ghosts are going about in the city. From this fragmentary state- 
ment the mandate, it is clear, must have been spoken at the close 
of the festival, so we cannot be wrong in placing it as the last 
act of the Chytroi. 
The statement of Suidas in itself makes the significance of the 
_ words abundantly clear, but close parallels are not wanting in the 
ritual of other races. The Lemuria at Rome is a case in point. 
According to Ovid? each father of a family as the festival came 
round had to lay the ghosts of his house after a curious and 
complex fashion. When midnight was come and all was still, he 
arose and standing with bare feet he made a special sign with his 
fingers and thumb to keep off any ghost. Thrice he washes his 
hands in spring water, then he turns round and takes black beans 
into his mouth; with face averted he spits them away, and as he 
spits them says, ‘These I send forth, with these beans I redeem 
myself and mine. Nine times he speaks, and looks not back. 
The ghost, they believe, picks them up and follows behind if no 
one looks. Again he touches the water and strikes the brass of 
Temesa and begs the ghost to leave his house. When nine times 
1 Suidas s.v. @dpafe* dw rijs Avpas* 
5 Ovipage Kapes, ov« ér’ ’AvOecrnpia, 
oi ev dia tAHOOs olkeray Kapixdv eipfjobal pacw, ws év rots AvOecrnplois ebwroupevwy 
avtwv Kal ovK épyafoucvwr. Tis ovv éopris TeAecOelans Néyew emi Ta epya exrréuTovTas 
auTous* 
Ovpage KGpes, ovx ér’ ’AvOecrhpia. 
Twes O€ otTw THY Tapoimiay pact: 
Ovpace Khpes, ovK eve “AvGeornpia, 
@s Kara THY Wodw Tois “AvOecTypias Tov Wuxav TepLepXouevwr. 
Photius s.v. substantially identical. 

To the information here given Zenobius (Cent. Paroimiogr.) adds: Eipnrac de 7 
maporuia érl Tov Ta avira éemifnrotvTwy mdvTore NauBdvew. It is fortunate that Suidas 
records his second conjecture, as his first is rendered plausible by the fact that we 
know the household servants were admitted to the Pithoigia. Probably in classical 
days xjpes had already become an old fashioned word for souls and the formulary 
may have been easily misunderstood. Mommsen in his second edition (Feste der 
Stadt Athen, p. 386) argues that the form xfpes is impossible because ‘ Gespenstern 
zeigt man nicht die Thiir wie einem Bettler,’ a difficulty that will scarcely be felt 


by any one acquainted with primitive customs. 
2 Ovid, Fasti v. 443. F 


— 3 ag 





J _—_ 


36 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


he has said,‘ Shades of my fathers, depart’ (Manes exite paterni!), 
he looks back and holds that the rite has been duly done. We 
cannot impute to the Anthesteria all the crude minutiae of the 
Lemuria, but the content is clearly the same—the expulsion of 
ancestral ghosts. The Lemuria took place not in the spring but 
in the early summer, May—a time at which ceremonies of puri- 
fication were much needed. 

A second striking parallel is recorded by Mr Tylor’. He says 
of a like Sclavonic custom, ‘when the meal was over the priest 
rose from the table and hunted out the souls of the dead like 
fleas with these words: “ Ye have eaten and drunk, souls, now go, 
now go”. Dr Oldenberg? calls attention to another analogy. 
In sacrifices in India to the dead the souls of ancestors are first 
invoked, then bidden to depart, and even invited to return again 
after the prescribed lapse of a month. 

The formula used at the close of the Anthesteria is in itself 
ample proof that the Anthesteria was a festival of All Souls; 
here at last we know for certain what was dimly shadowed in the 
Diasia, that some portion at least of the ritual of the month 
Anthesterion was addressed to the powers of the underworld, 
and that these powers were primarily the ghosts of the dead. 
The evidence is not however confined to an isolated proverbial 
formulary. The remaining ritual of the Chytroi confirms it. 
Before they were bidden to depart the ghosts were feasted and 
after significant fashion. 

The scholiast on Aristophanes* commenting on the words tTo@s 
(epoiat XUTpovae, ‘at the holy Pot-feast,’ explains the ceremonies 
as follows: ‘The Chytroi is a feast among the Athenians; the 
cause on account of which it is celebrated is explained by Theo- 
pompos who writes thus: ......“They have the custom of sacrificing 
at this feast, not to any of the Olympian gods at all, but to Hermes 
Chthonios” ; and again in explaining the word yu7pa, pot: “ And 
of the pot which all the citizens cook none of the priests tastes, 


1 Primitive Culture u. p. 40. 2 Religion des Vedas, p. 553. 
% Schol, ad Ar, Ran, 218 rois iepoiae X’rpore’ NXvrpor opr} wap’ ’AOnvalos* a@yerac 
6é mapa ravrnv Ti airlay, jv Kal Oedrouros éxrlberar ypadwy oirws* < >...€rera* 







Oiew abrois 00s éxovor Trav mev ‘Ohuurlwv Oedv ovdevl TO mapdmrav, ‘Epun dé 
kal THs XUTpas, jw EPovor wdvres ol Kara THv wide, odels yeverar TOY lepéwy* TE 
mooie. TH <ty > huépa. Kal: rods rére mapaywoucvous brép trav drobh 
iAdoacba Tov Epi. lepdy Ray., tepéwy Ven.: whichever be followed, the 

of not tasting is clear. y 


11] Fhe Chytroi 37 


they do this on the (13th) day”; and again: “Those present 


appease Hermes on account of the dead”. The scholiast on | 


another passage in Aristophanes! says substantially the same, 
but adds, again on the authority of Theopompos, that the practice 
of cooking the dish of seeds was observed by those who were 
saved from the deluge on behalf of those who perished. The 
deluge is of course introduced from a desire to get mythological 
precedent; the all-important points are that the yvtpa, the dish of 
grain and seeds, was offered to none of the Olympians, not even 
to Dionysos in whose honour the festival was ostensibly celebrated, 
but. only to Hermes Chthonios, Hermes of the Underworld, and 
that of this sacrifice no man tasted. It was no sacrifice of com- 
munion, but like the holocaust made over utterly to dread chthonic 
powers, and behind this notion of sacrifice to the underworld 
deities lay the still earlier notion that it was dead men’s food, 
a supper for the souls. 

Before we leave the yi’tpa it is necessary to examine more 
precisely the name of the day, Chytroi. August Mommsen? has 
emphasized the fact, too much neglected, that the name of the 
festival is masculine, of yvtpow not ai xvtTpas. The feminine 
form yuvTpac means pots artificially made; the masculine form 
xuUTpot, Which occurs far less frequently, means in ordinary parlance 
natural pots, 1.e. holes in the ground. Pausanias® speaks of a certain 
natural bath at Thermopylae which the country people called ‘ the 
Chytroi of the women’; and Herodotus‘ describes it in the same 
terms. Theophrastos’ in his History of Plants speaks of a certain 
plant as growing in a place between the Kephisos and the Melas, 
‘the place being called Pelekania, i.e. certain hollows in the marsh, 
the so-called Pot-holes.’ Hesychius’, interpreting of yvtpsvos, says 
they are ‘the hollow places of the earth through which springs 
come up. The word xcodrvuB7Apa itself, in classical Greek a 
natural pool, became in mediaeval Greek a font, and it may be 


1 Schol. ad Ar. Ach. 1076 Xirpouvs: Oedropurros Tovs diacwOévras Ex TOU KaTaKAVT MOU 
evjoal dyno xUTpas TavoTreppias OOev otrw KAnOHvac Ti éoprnv...THs dé XUTpas ovdeva 
yevoarbat. 

2 Feste der Stadt Athen, p. 385. 

3 P. rv. 35. 9 kohuuBHOpa nvTwa dvoudfovow oi émryapror XUTpous yuvackelous. 

4 Herod. vim. 176. 

® Theoph. Hist. Plant. 1v. 11. 8 otros d€ 6 rémros mpooayopeverar uty Ileexavia, 
TovTO 0 €orly dtTa xXUTpoL Kadovmeva BabiouaTa THs Niuvys. 

6 Hesych. s.v. of xvrpivor. 


- 


a 


38 The Anthesteria (on. 


noted that the natural chasms that occur in western Yorkshire 
still locally bear the name of ‘ Pots.’ 

It is possible therefore that the festival took its name from 
natural holes in the ground in the district of the Limnae where it 
was celebrated, a district to this day riddled with Turkish cisterns 
made of great earthen jars (7/01). Such holes may have been 
used for graves, and were in many parts of Greece regarded as the 
constant haunt of ghosts going up and down. They were perhaps 
the prototypes of the ‘chasms in the earth’ seen in the vision of 
Er:. Near akin were the megara or chasms of Demeter at 
Potniae’, and the clefts on and about the Pnyx where the women 
celebrated the Thesmophoria (p. 125). Such chasms would be the 
natural sanctuaries of a Ge and ghost cult. 

It is obvious that the two forms yvtpou and yutpar would 
easily pass over into each other, and it is hard to say which came 
first. It is also to be noted that, though the masculine form more 
often means natural hole, it is also used for artificial pot. Pollux’, 
in discussing ‘the vessels used by cooks,’ says that when Delphilos 
speaks of the big pot (yutpov péyav) at the cook’s, he clearly 
means the yrvtpa, not the foot-pan (yutpowoda). Though the 
form yvtpot ultimately established itself, the associations of 
xuUTpa, artificial pot, seem to have prevailed, and these associa- 
tions are important and must be noted. 

Hesychius‘ says that by ¢apywaxy is meant the yutpa which 
they prepared for those who cleansed the cities. From the 
scholiast on the Choephorot of Aeschylus® we learn that the 
Athenians purified their houses with a censer made of a pot; 

‘this they threw away at the meeting of three ways and went 


away_w tur ck. Here we have of course the origin 


of ‘Hecate’s suppers. These were primarily not feasts for the 
goddess but purification ceremonies, of which, as no mortal might 
taste them, it was supposed an infernal goddess partook. The day 
of the Chytroi was a day of such purifications. From some such 
notion arose the Aristophanice word éyyuTpifecr, ‘to pot, i.e. to utterly 
ruin and destroy, to make away with. The scholiast® explains it as 





iT, 
Plato, Rep. 614c, 2 P. rx. 8 3 On. x. 99. — 
4 Hesych. 8.v. papyany* 1 xvTpa jv hroluafoy Trois KaBalpover Tas 7 ONaaa 
5». 96. 
® Schol, ad Ar, Vesp, 289. 


I] The Choes 39 


referring to the practice of exposing children, but Suidas! knows 
of another meaning; he says the éyyutpictpvas were those ‘ women 
who purified the unclean, pouring upon them the blood of the 
victim, and also those who ‘poured libations to the dead,’ those in 
a word who performed ceremonies of placation and purgation. 

It is curious that, though most modern writers from Crusius 
onwards have recognised that the Chytroi was a dies nefastus and 
in the main a festival of ghosts, this day has been separated off 
from the rest of the Anthesteria, and the two previous days have 
been regarded as purely drinking festivals:—the Pithoigia the 
opening of the wine-cask, the Choes the drinking of the wine- 
cups. And yet for the second day, the Choes, literary testimony 
is explicit. Spite of the drinking contest, the flower-wreathed 
cups and the wedding of Dionysos, all joyful elements of the 
service of the wine-god, the Choes was a dies nefastus, an unlucky 
day, a day to be observed with apotropaic precautions. Photius?, 
in explaining the words pwapa 7pépa, ‘day of pollution, says such 
a day occurred ‘in the Choes in the month of Anthesterion, in 
which (i.e. during the Choes) they believed that the spirits of 
the dead rose up again. From early morning they used to chew 
buckthorn and anointed their doors with pitch. Buckthorn, 
known to modern botanists as Rhamnus catharticus, is a plant of 
purgative properties. The ancient Athenian, like the modern 
savage, believed that such plants have the power of keeping off 
evil spirits, or rather perhaps of ejecting them when already in 
possession. Chewing a substance was naturally a thorough and 
efficient way of assimilating its’ virtues. The priestess of Apollo 
chewed the laurel leaf. It seems possible that she may have 
‘primarily had to do this rather as a means of ejecting the bad 
spirits than to obtain inspiration from the good. Fasting is a 
substantial safe-guard, but purgation more drastically effective. 


che _pr lactic rties of rhamnus, buckthorn, were well 
known to the ancients. ioscorides? in his Materia Medica 


1 Suidas s.v. éyxurplorpi* ai Tas xous Tols TeTeAeuTHKOTW Emipépovoat...€yXUTPt- 
atplas d€ NéyeoOat Kal doar Tos Evarye’s KaNalpovow, aiwa émryéovoat iepelov. 

2 Photius s.v. prapa nuépa* ev tots Xovolv AvOecrnpi@vos unvds, ev @ Soxovow ai 
Wuxai Tov TeNeuTHUAYT WY ayiéval, payyvwr Ewhev Euac@yTo Kal wiTTy Tas BUpas ExXpLov. 

% Diosc. De mat. med. 1. 119 Néyerar 5é Kai KAGvas adris OUpars 7) OUpace mpooTe- 
Gévtas dmoxpovew Tas Tov Papuakwy Kaxoupyias. For this reference I am indebted to 
the kindness of Dr Frazer, who also notes that in Ovid spina alba, white thorn, is 
placed in a window to keep off tristes nowas and striges (Ovid, Fasti v1. 129—163), 


40 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


writes, ‘it is said that branches of this plant attached to doors 
or hung up outside repel the evil arts of magicians.’ Possibly, 
in addition to the-chewing of buckthorn, branches of it were 
fastened to doors. at the festival of the Choes, and served the same 
purpose as the pitch. Pitch, Photius tells us in commenting 
on rhamnus, was‘on account of its special purity used also to 
drive away sprites at the birth of a child—always a perilous 
moment’. 

It is not easy to imagine an enlightened citizen of the Athens 
of the fifth century B.c., an Aeschylus, a Pericles, chewing buck- 
thorn from early dawn to keep off the ghosts of his ancestors, but 
custom in such matters has an iron hand. If the masters of the 
house shirked the chewing of buckthorn, the servants would see 
to it that the doors were at least anointed with pitch; it is best 
to be on the safe side in these matters, and there is the public 
opinion of conservative neighbours to be considered. Be this as 
it may, it is quite clear that the day of the Choes was a day of 
ghosts like the day of the Chytroz. 

But, if the ceremonies of the Choes clearly indicate the ‘un- 
lucky’ nature of the day, what is to be made of the name? 
Nothing, as it stands. Choes, Cups, are undeniably cheerful. But, 
as in the case of Chytroi, there may have been a confusion 
between approximate forms; the two words yo7, funeral libation, 
and yovs, cup, have a common stem yor. May not yoes have 
superimposed itself on yoai, wine-cups upon funeral libations? 
A scholiast on Aristophanes* seems to indicate some such a con- 
aminatio. In explaining the word yods, he says the meaning is 
‘pourings forth, offerings to the dead or libations. An oracle was 
issued that they must offer libations (ods) yearly to those of the 
Aetolians who had died, and celebrate the festival so called.” Here 
the name of a festival Xods is oxytone, and though we cannot 


and compares the English notion that hawthorn keeps off witches (see Golden Bough, 
second edit. vol. 1. p. 124, note 3). Miss M. C. Harrison tells me that to this day 
rue (ruta) is eaten on Ascension Day at Pratola Peligna and other places in the 
Abruzzi, ‘that the witches may not come to torment our children” (noi mangiamo 
la ruta affinche le streghe non vengano a tormentare le creature nostre); see A, De 
Nino, Usi Abruzzesi 1. p. 168. 

' Phot. s.v. pduvos* murdv 5 év rots Xovolv ws ddekipdpuaxov éuacavro wher, cat 
witty éxplovro Ta Swmara, dulavros yap atirn* dd Kal év rats yevéoeot Tov madlwv 
xplovor ras oiklas els dwé\aow rdv datndvwr. 

* Schol. ad Ar, Ach. 961 Xods’ éyxtoes, evaylouara éml vexpois } omovdds. 
éxmimrer xpnomos dev xoas rots redvewor rav Alrwrdv émdyew dva ray ero : 
éoprynv Xoas dyew. 





1] The Choes 41 


assume that it was identical with the Athenian Choes, it looks as 
if there was some confusion as to the two analogous forms. 

If we view the Choes as Xoai, the Cups as Libations, the 
anomalous and, as it stands, artificial connection of Orestes_with 
the festival becomes at_once clear. At the drinking bout of the 
ae ee eis ome thenneus*and other authorities, the singular 
custom prevailed that each man should drink by himself. A 
mythological reason was sought to account for this, and th 
story was told? that Orestes, polluted by the blood of his mother, 


came to Athens at the time of the celebration of the Choes. The | 


reigning king, variously called Pandion and Phanodemus, wished 
to show him hospitality, but religious scruple forbade him to let 
a man polluted enter the Sanctuaries or drink with those cere- 
monially clean. He therefore ordered the Sanctuaries to be shut 
and a measure of wine (yovs) to be set before each man severally, 
and bade them, when they had finished drinking, not to offer up 
the garlands with which they had been crowned in the Sanctuaries, 
because they had been under the same roof with Orestes; but he 
bade each man place his wreath round his own cup, and so bring 
them to the priestess at the precinct of the Limnae. That done, 
they were to perform the remaining sacrifices in the Sanctuary. 
From this, Athenaeus adds, the festival got the name of Cups. The 
mad Orestes in the Iphigenia in Tauris* tells the same tale and 
naively states that, though he was hurt by the procedure, he dare 
not ask the reason, knowing it all too well. 

The whole account is transparently aetiological. Some mytho- 
logical precedent is desired for the drinking bout of the Choes, 
based as it was on a ceremony of funeral libations; it 1s sought and 
found or rather invented in the canonical story of Orestes, and he 
is made to say in a fashion almost too foolish even for a madman: 

‘And this I learn, that my mishaps became 
A rite for the Athenians; and Pallas’ folk 


Have still this custom that they reverence 
The Choan vessel.’ 


If we suppose that the Cups (xdes) were originally Libations 
(xoat), the somewhat strained punctilio of the host becomes at 
least intelligible. Orestes is polluted by the guilt (dyos) of his 


1 Athen. vit. 2 § 276. . 
2 Athen. x. 49 § 437 and Suidas s.v. Xdes. 3 Eur. Iph. in T. 953 seq. 


ae 


42 ‘The Anthesteria [ CH. 


mother’s blood, he finds the people in the Limnae’, close to the 
Areopagos, celebrating the Xoai, the libations to the dead; till 
he is purified from kindred blood he cannot join: all is simple 
and clear. 

If the Choes were in intent yoai, the Cups Libations, the 
ceremony has an interesting parallel in a rite performed at the 
Eleusinian mysteries. Athenaeus*, in discussing various shapes 
of cups says: ‘The plemochoé is an earthen vessel shaped lke 
a top that stands fairly steady; some call it, Pamphilos tells us, 
’ the cotyliscus. And they use it at Eleusis on the last day of the 
mysteries, which takes its name Plemochoai from the cup. On 
this day they fill two plemochoae and set them up, the one towards 
the East, the other towards the West, and pronounce over them a 
magic formula. The author of the Peirithous mentions them, 
whether he be Ktesias the Tyrant or Euripides, as follows: 

“That these plemochoae down the Chthonian chasm 
With words well-omened we may pour.”’ 

It is at least significant that a compound of the word yoy 
should both give its name to a festival day and to a vessel 
used in chthonic ritual. 

The Chytroi and Choes then bear unmistakeably a character of 
gloom, and in their primary content are festivals of ghosts. But 
what of the Pithoigia? Surely this day is all revel and jollity, all 
for Dionysos ? . 

Had we been dependent on literature alone, such would have 
been our inevitable conclusion. In Plutarch’s account of the 
Pithoigia (p. 33), the earliest and fullest we possess, there is 
no hint of any worship other than that of the wine-god, no hint 
of possible gloom. Eustathius® indeed tells of a Pithoigia or Jar- 

opening which was ‘not of a festal character, but in every respect 

“unlucky, but this is the Pithoigia, the Jar-opening, of Pandora. 
Here we have a hint that a Pithoigia need not be an opening of 
Wine-jars; there are other jars, other openings, but save for 
the existence of one small fragile monument the significance of 
the hint would have escaped us. 

! The topographical question does not here immediately concern the argument. 
I have tried to show elsewhere (J.H.S. xx. p. 111) that the precinct of the Limnae 


cannot be severed from the Areopagos without grave loss to mythology. 
* Athen. x1. 93 § 496. 


% Kustath. ad Jl. xx1v. 526, p. 1363. 26 obx éoprdciuos,. aN’ és Td wav drrodpas. 






— The Pithoigia 43 


In the vase-painting in fig. 7 from a lekythos in the University 
Museum of Jena! we see a Pith- 
oigia of quite other and more 
solemn intent. A large pithos 
is sunk deep into the ground. 
It has served as a grave. In 
primitive days many a man, 
Diogenes-like, lived the ‘life 
of the jar’ p-ab but_not 
from philosophy, rather from 
dire necessity. During the Pelo- 
‘ponnesian war,when the city was 
crowded with refugees, a jar (770- 
@axvn) was a welcome shelter’. 
A man’s home during his life is 
apt to be his grave in death. 
In the Dipylon Cemetery at 
Athens, at Aphidna®, at Corfu, 
at Thoricus, and in many an- 
other burying place, such grave pitho: have come to light. From 
the grave-jar in fig. 7 the lid has been removed; out of it have 
escaped, fluttering upward, two winged Keres or souls, a third 
soul is in the act of emerging, a fourth is diving headlong back 
into the jar. Hermes Psychopompos, with his magic staff in his 
hand, is evoking, revoking the souls. The picture is a speaking 
commentary on the Anthesteria; we seem to hear the mandate 
‘Out of the doors! ye souls; it is no longer Anthesteria!’ The \ 
Pithoigia of the Anthesteria is the primitive Pithoigia of the 
grave-jars, later overlaid by the Pithoigia of the wine-jars. io 

The vase-painting in fig. 7 must not be regarded as an actual 
conscious representation of the Athenian rite performed on the 
first day of the Anthesteria. It is more general in content; it is 
in fact simply a representation of ideas familiar to every Greek, 
that the pithos was a grave-jar, that from such grave-jars souls 





1 First published by Dr Paul Schadow, Eine Attische Grablekythos, Inangural- 
Dissertation (Jena, 1897), reproduced and discussed by the present writer J.H.S. 


2 Ar. Eq. 792. Mr R. A. Neil ad loe. points out that ri#os answers to jidelia in 
etymology, to dolium in meaning. 
3 Dr Sam. Wide, ‘Aphidna in Nord-Attica,’ A. Mitt. 1896, p. 398. 








+4 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


escaped and to them necessarily returned, and that Hermes was 
Psychopompos, Evoker and Revoker of souls. The vase-painting 
is in fact only another form of the scene so often represented on 
Athenian white lekythoi, in which the souls flutter round the 
grave-stele. The grave-jar is but the earlier form of sepulture ; 
the little winged figures, the Keres, are identical in both classes 
of vase-painting. 

The nature of these Keres will be further analysed when we 

/come to the discussion of primitive demonology. For the present 
it is enough to note that the Keres in the vase-paintings and the 
Keres of the Anthesteria are regarded as simply souls of dead 
men, whereas the little winged phantoms that escape from 
Pandora’s jar are indeed ghosts, but ghosts regarded rather as 
noisome sprites than as spirits; they are the source of disease 
and death rather than dead men’s souls. The jar of Pandora 
is not so much a grave as a store-house of evil; the pithos as 
store-house not only of wine but of grain and all manner of 
provisions was familiar to the Greeks. The ordinary pithos was 
pointed at the base and buried permanently in the earth like a 
Turkish cistern; a row of such pithoi, like those recently unearthed 
at Cnossus, might serve equally as a wine-cellar or a granary or 
a cemetery. 

The attributes of Hermes in the vase- -painting in fig. 7 are 
noticeable. In one hand he holds his familiar herald’s staff, the 
kerykeion. But, and this is the interesting point, he is not using 
St; it is held in the left hand, inert; it is merely attributive, present 
out of convention. The real implement of his agency in revoking 
the souls is held uplifted in the right hand; it is his rhabdos, his 
magic wand, 

This rhabdos is, I think, clearly to be iiouinealah from the 
kerykeion, though ultimately the two became contaminated. The 
kerykeion or herald’s staff is in intent a king’s sceptre held by 
the herald as deputy; it is a staff, a walking-stick, a Baxtpop, 
by which you are supported; the rhabdos is a simple rod, even 
a pliable twig, a thing not by which you are supported but 
with which you sway others. It is in a word the enchanter’s 
wand. 

It is with a rhabdos that Circe’ transforms the comrades of 

1 Od. x. 236, 





1] The Pithoigia 45 


Odysseus into swine; it is as magical as the magic potion they 


drink : 


‘Straight with her rhabdos smote she them and penned them in the sties,’ 


With the rhabdos Hermes’ led the ghosts of the slain suitors 
to Hades. He held in his hand 
‘His rhabdos fair and golden wherewith he lulls to rest 
The eyes of men whoso he will, and others by his hest 
He wakes from sleep. He stirred the ghosts; they followed to their doom 
And gibbered like the bats that throng and gibber in the gloom,’ 
This magic wand became the attribute of all who hold sway 
over the dead. It is the wand, not the sceptre, that is the token 
of life or death, as Pindar’ shows: 
‘Nor did Hades the king 
Forget his wand to wave 
Whereby he doth bring 
Shapes of men dying 
Adown the hollow roadway of the grave.’ 
The rhabdos as magic wand was tresaiBpotos, enchanter of the 
dead, before it became as sceptre weai(Bportos, ruler of mortals. 
Eustathius tells us in the passage already discussed’, that the 
kerykeion was also called croyzros, conductor, and that it was 
carried in the hands of those who performed ceremonies of purifi- 
cation. He is trying, it will be remembered, to derive the words 
dioTroptrety and amodvoroumeiv. When an ancient author is trying 
to derive words, we are bound to accept his statements only with 
the utmost caution; still in this particular instance there seems no 
reason for suspecting the statement that the kerykeion was called 
Topumros ; it is dragged in quite gratuitously, and does not help out 
the proposed derivation. What Eustathius says is this: ‘At the 
end of the month Maimakterion they perform ceremonies of sending, 
among which was the carrying of the magic fleece, and there take 


1 Od. xxtv. 1—9. 
2 Pind. Ol. 1x. 33 
od’ “Aiéas axwiyrav éxe paBdov 
Bporea caépad? a Kardye Koihay mpods ayulay 
OvackévTwr. 
dxwrav is usually rendered ‘unraised’ as though the sceptre were lifted in token 
of kingly power. I translate by ‘wave’ because I believe the action denoted is the 
waving or moving of a wand, not the raising of a sceptre. The verb xwéw is, 
I believe, characteristic of this wand-waving. xivéw is used in Homer (loc. cit.) 
7™ 8 dye kwioas. By Pindar’s time the wand and the sceptre were fused, but 
he is haunted by the old connotation of magic. 
° For text, see p. 24, note 2. 


46 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


place then throwings out of purifications at the crossways, and 
they hold in their hands the pompos (i.e. conductor), the which 
they say is the kerykeion, the attribute of Hermes.’ The object 
of the whole ceremony is ‘to send out polluted things.’ It is, 
I think, significant that the kerykeion, or rather to be strictly 
accurate the rhabdos?, was carried in apotropaic ceremonies, pre- 
sumably with a view to exorcise bad spirits, which as will appear 
later were regarded as the source of all impurities. It is the 
other face of revocation; the rhabdos is used either for the raising 
or the laying of ghosts, for the induction (€sraywy7) of good spirits, 
for the exorcism (a7rotpo7n) of bad. 

In discussing the Anthesteria on a previous occasion’, I felt 
confident that in the opening of the grave-jars we had the complete 
solution of the difficulty of the unlucky character of the day 
Pithoigia. It seems to me now in the light of further investi- 
gation that another ritual element may have gone to its deter- 
mination. 

Plutarch*, in discussing the nature of the sacred objects 
committed to the care of the Vestal Virgins, makes the following 
notable statement: ‘Those who pretend to have most special 
knowledge about them (i.e. the Vestal Virgins) assert that there | 
are set there two jars (7ri@ov) of no great size, of which the one is 
open and empty, the other full and sealed up, and neither of them 
may be seen except by these all-holy virgins. But others think 
that this is false, and that the idea arose from the fact that the 
maidens then placed most of their sacred things in two jars, and 
hid them underground below the temple of Quirinus, and that the 
place even now is called from that by the title Pithisct (Doliola),’ 
We have two other notices of these Doliola. Varro‘ says: ‘The 
place which is called Doliola is at the Cloaca Maxuma, where 
people are not allowed to spit. It»is*so called from the jars 
beneath the earth. Two accounts are given of these jars: some 

1 Space forbids the discussion of the whole evolution of the kerykeion. It 
contains elements drawn from both sceptre and rhabdos. The rhabdos is sometimes 
forked like a divining rod: the forks were entwined in various shapes. Round the 
rhabdos a snake, symbol of the underworld, was sometimes curled as the snake 
is curled round the staff of Aesculapius. Ultimately the twisted ends of- 
rhabdos were crystallized into curled decorative snakes. In like fashion the fr 
fringe of the leather aegis of Athene is misunderstood and rendered as snakes, 
the time of Hustathius, kerykeion and rhabdos are not clearly differentiated. 


a E68. SX. Pp. 101. 3 Plut. Vit. Cam. xx. 
4 Ling. Lat. 5 § 157. 





}. 


; 


Zz 


11] Derivation of Anthesteria 47 


say they contain the bones of dead bodies, others that after the 
death of Numa Pompilius certain sacred objects (religiosa quae- 
dam) were buried there.’ Festus! gives substantially the same 
account, but he says that the sacred objects were buried there 
when the Gauls mvaded the city. 

Of jars containing ‘sacra’ we have in Greece no knowledge, 
but it is significant to find that Zeus, who was the heir to so 
much antique ritual, had on his threshold in Olympus two jars, 
one containing good the other evil?: 

‘Jars twain upon Zeus’ threshold ever stood ; 
One holds his gifts of evil, one of good.’ 

With some such notion as that of the Pithoigia must have 
been connected the ceremony of the opening of the mundus or 
round pit on the Palatine. Festus* tells us that on three days 
in the year, August 24, October 5, November 6, the lapis manalis 
that covered it was removed. Varro, quoted by Macrobius‘, adds: 


‘when the mundus is open, the gate of the doleful underworld gods 
1S open.’ 


It has been shown that the ritual of each of the several days 
points determinedly ghost-wards. The names in each case admit 
at least of chthonic interpretation. It remains to examine the 
collective name <Anthesteria. 

The ancients sought and found what was to them a satisfactory 
etymology. Istros, writing in the third century B.c. and quoted by 
Harpocration, says that Anthesterion is the blossoming month 
because then ‘the most of the things that spring from the earth 
blossom forth’ The Etymologicon Magnum offers an easy-going 
alternative: feast and month bear their names either because the 
earth then began to blossom, or because they offered flowers at 
the festival. 

It was not the habit of those days to trouble about ‘ verb-stems ’ 
and ‘nouns of the agent in typ, but it is surprising to find that 
the dubious guess hazarded by Istros should have passed so long 


1 Pauli excerpta ex Lib. Pomp. Fest. s.v. doliola. 
2 [liad xxv. 527 
dovol yap te miBor xatakelarae év Aros otdw 
Owpwr ofa didwor Kax@v Etepos dé Edwy. 
3 Fest. 154. 4 Macr. Sat. 1. 16. 18. 
i > Harpocrat. s.v.’AvOeor. dia TO wAeloTa THY Ex THS yHs avGety TOTE. 
6 Hiym. Mag. s.v. "AvOeornpia. 


4 x: Ginn Jot 





‘ Ao me : 
| » OF 
RY Vee t Pe ae er 


48 The Anthesteria [ OH. 


unchallenged by modern science, the more so as flowers have but 
a general and accidental connection with the ritual of the feast. 
Are scholars really content with an etymology that makes of the 
Anthesteria the festival of those who ‘did the flowers ’? 

In a recent paper in the Hellenic Journal’ Dr A. W. Verrall 
has faced the difficulty and offered a new solution. The names of 
festivals, he points out, are no exception to the rule that nouns in 
Tnpto are normally formed from verb-stems through the ‘noun of 
the agent’ in rnp, and take their sense from the action described 
by the verb, as cwtnpios, AuTHpios, BovNevTypcov. In like fashion 
the names of festivals ending in rypca describe the action in which 
the ceremony consisted, or with which it was chiefly connected. 
Thus avaxAnTHpva is a feast or ceremony of avaxAnots, avakadvTr- 
Thpta Of avaxadvs and so on. Prima facie then a derivation 
of Anthesteria should start from the assumption that the stem 
is verbal. 

“But we need not assume that the verbal stem is av@ec-. 
Perhaps av@eoc- itself needs analysis; and for the first syllable 
there is an obviously possible origin in the preposition dv- (ava), 
of which so many examples (e.g. av@ewa = avabeua) are preserved 
in the poets. The verb-stem will then be @ec-, which is in fact a 
verb-stem and has more than one meaning. The meaning which 
would perhaps in any case have suggested itself first, and which 
now seems especially attractive, is that which appears in the 
archaic verb OécacOai or BécoacOar to pray or pray for*, and 
in the adjectives 7oAv@eoTos and amoeoros. Prayers and invo- 
cations addressed to the dead were a regular part of the proceed- 
ings by which they were brought back to the world of the living. 
The compound avabécoacbar would, after the analogy of avaxaXetv 
and the like, bear the sense to raise by prayer or to recall by 
prayer, literally ‘to pray up’ or ‘pray back. And avOeornpra, 
derived from avabéccacOa, would be the feast of revocation, the 
name, as usual, signifying the action in which the ceremony con- 
sisted and which was the object of it*.” 

In connection with this new and illuminating etymology, it is 
interesting to note that even in their misguided derivation “ 






1 J.H.S, xx. 115. 2 Od. x. 526. es 
* My view of the primitive significance of the root @ec, which is perhaps primarily 
rather to conjure than to pray, will appear more clearly when we come to the (Cis- 
cussion of the 'Chesmophoria. 


11] Anthesterion and February 49 


avOos the ancients themselves lay stress not so much on the 
flowers as on the rising up’, the avOeiv é« ths yhs. Under the 
word "Av@ea the Etymologicon Magnum says ‘a title of Hera 
when she sends up (avinev) fruits, where there seems a haunting 
of the true meaning though none of the form’. 

Dr Verrall declines to assert positively the derivation of 
Anthesteria he propounds, but a second philological argument 
brings certain conviction. Mr R. A. Neil suggests that the root 
which appears in Greek as Ges may appear as fes fer in Latin. 
This gives us the delightful equation or rather analogy dv-@ec- 
thpia, in-fer-tae. Of course inferiae is usually taken as from 
inferi, infra etc., but no Latin word ought to have medial f except 
when preceded by a separable prefix. To make certainty more 
certain we have the Feralia, the festival of All Souls, kept from 
the 13th to the 31st of the month of Fe(b)ruary. The month of 
purification is the month of rites to the dead, in a word purgation 
is the placation of souls. This is true for Latin and Greek alike 
and will emerge more clearly when we come to study in detail the 
ritual of the month of February. 


ANTHESTERION AND FEBRUARY. 


The general'analogy between the months of Anthesterion and 
February, and the fact that both alike were unlucky and given 
over to the service of the dead, was clear to the ancients them- 
selves. The scholiast on Lucian’s 7imon?, commenting on the 
word Diasia, says: ‘The day is unlucky...there were among the 


1 Dr Wuensch in his instructive pamphlet Hin Friihlingsfest auf Malta (Leipzig, 
1902) discusses a spring festival of the flowering of beans which he believes to be 
analogous to the Anthesteria, but the rites practised are wholly different. Dr Hiller 
von Gaertringen (Festschrift fiir O. Benndorf) calls attention to the title Anthister 
which occurs in an inscription found on Thera, but the inscription is of the second 
century B.c., the festival of the ‘Anthesteria’ was celebrated on Thera, as indeed 
wherever there was a primitive population, and Anthister must have borrowed rather 
than lent his name. 

2 Archbishop Eustathius may have had a dim consciousness of the separable 
ava when he says dv@os éru éx Tod avabéew TaphKTar KaTa oUyKOT HP. 

3 Schol. ad Luc. Tim. 43 drogpas 7 juépa)...joav map “Ed\now juépar ampatiay 
elonyoUpevat TavTos Kai dpyiav, as droppddas Exahouv. ev Tatras ovdE TpocetTeEV av Tis 
Twa, ov6é Kabdmat piros éreutyvuTo diy, GAda Kai Ta iepad axpnudrioTa Hy airois. 
éxadelro 6é Tadra abrois Kara Tov Pevpovdpioy piva dre Kai évyyifov Tois KaraxPovio.s* 
‘Kal m&s ovros 6 why dveiro Karorxouévas peTa oTuyvornTos mdvTwy MpoloyTwY ETEpoY 
Tpomov dv kai Ta Avaowa orvyvdgovtes jyov “AOnvaior. 


H. 4 


50 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


Greeks certain days which brought with them complete idleness 
and cessation of business, and which were called unlucky (az7ro- 
dpades). On these days no one would accost any one else, and 
friends would positively have no dealings with each other, and even 
sanctuaries were not used. These times were so accounted on 
the analogy of the month of February, when aiso it was the custom 
to sacrifice to those below, and all that month was dedicated to 
the dead and accompanied by gloom, everything going on in an 
unusual fashion just as the Athenians celebrated the Diasia in 
gloom.’ Clearly to the scholiast the Diasia is but one element 
of a month given over to the dead. 

The meaning of Anthesterion, the significance of its ceremonies, 
have been effectively overlaid by the wine-god and his flower 
garlands, but with the Romans there was no such superposition 

nd consequently no misunderstanding. They clearly realized two 
things, that February was the month of the dead, and that it was 
the month of purification. Plutarch in his Roman Questions’ asks 
‘Why was Decimus Brutus wont to sacrifice to the dead in 
December, whereas all other Romans offered libations and saeri- 
fices to the dead in the month of February?’ In his twenty-fifth 
Question’, while discussing the reasons why the days following 
respectively the Calends, Nones and Ides of each month were 
unlucky, he tells us that the Romans ‘used to consecrate the first 
month of the year to the Olympian gods, but the second to the 
gods of the earth, and in this second month (February) they were 
wont to practise certain purifications and to sacrifice to the dead.’ 
Athenaeus states that ‘Juba the Mauretanian said that the month 
of February was so called from the terrors of the lower world, with 
regard to means taken for riddance from such alarms at the time 
when the winter is at its height, and it is the custom to offer 
libations to the dead on several days.’ Juba the Mauretanian must 
have known quite well that in February the winter was not at its 
height. He states correctly the fact that February was a month 


1 Plut. Q. R. xxxiv. dia rl, rv dANwv ‘Pwualwy év Te PeBpovaplwy unvi mocovméevwv 
xoas Kal évayicpuods rots reOvnxdar, Aéxiuos Bpodros (ws Kixépwy iordpnxev) év 7@ 
AexeuBply rotr’ érparrev; 

* Plut. Q. R. xxv. rOv unvaGy roy wer rpSrov ddvurilos Oeots iépwaay rdv be dev repo 
xOovlas év Kal kaBapunovs Twas Teodor Kal Trois KaToLyouevots évayltovew. 

% Athen. ur. 53 § 98 rdv 6€ uAva rodrov KAnOjval pnow 6 Maupdcwos "LéBas awd trav 
Karovdalwy PiBwv Kar’ dvalperw rdv demdrwv év @ Tod xewdvos éore TO axmacérarov 
kal 80s rére Tots Karotxouévors Tas Yous émipépe Todais Hudpacs. 


11 | The Lupercalia 51 


devoted to ceremonies for the riddance of terrors from the under- 
world, but carelessly adds an impossible reason for the selection of 
this particular month. 

Ovid is of all witnesses the most weighty because his testimony 
is if part unconscious. In the opening words of the second book 
of the Fusti}, after an invocation to Janus, he goes straight to the 
question of what the Romans meant by the word februwm ; he notes 
that the term was applied to many things, wool, a branch from a 
pine-tree, grain roasted with salt, and finally concludes that ‘any 
thmg by which the soul was purged was called by his rude 
ancestors februwm.’ 


‘Denique quodcumque est, quo pectora nostra piantur, 
Hoc apud intonsos nomen habebat avos.’ 

The month he feels sure got its name from these ‘februa’ or 
purifications, but he asks ‘ was it because the Luperci purified all 
the soil with the strips of skin and accounted that a purification 
or atonement, or was it because when the dies ferales were accom- 
plished then owing to the fact that the dead were appeased there 
was a season of purity ?’ 


‘Mensis ab his dictus secta quia pelle Luperci 
Omne solum lustrant idque piamen habent ? 

Aut quia placatis sunt tempora pura sepulcris, 
Tune cum ferales praeteriere dies ?’ 

Both the ceremonials, the Lupercalia and the Feralia, were, he 
knows, cathartic: that Fe(b)rua and Feralia were etymologically and 
significantly the same naturally he does not guess. Still less could 
he conjecture that etymologically February and Anthesterion are in 
substance one. 

The two great February festivals” to which Ovid alludes are of 
course the Feralia and the Lupercalia, celebrated respectively on 
the 21st and 15th of February. 

The Feralia was but the climax of a series of days beginning 
on Feb. 13th and devoted to ceremonies of the worship of ancestors, 
Parentalia. It is curious that, though the Lemuria (May 9—13) 
were marked as Nefasti, none of the days of the Parentalia were so 
marked: still from the 13th to the 21st marriages were forbidden 

1 Ovid, Fasti m1. 19. 
2 The ceremonies of the Lupercalia have been fully discussed by Warde-Fowler, 


The Roman Festivals, p. 310, and very fully by Mannhardt, Mythologische Forsch- 
ungen, p. 72. 


4—2 


52 The Anthesteria [CH. | 


temples closed, and magistrates appeared without their insignia ; 
clearly there was some lingering dread of ghosts that might be. 
about. Parentalia’ and Feralia alike were ceremonies wholly » 
devoted to the placation of ghosts. 

In the Lupercalia, on the other hand, it is purification rather | 
than placation that is the prominent feature in the rites. Much 
in the Lupercalia is obscure, and especially the origin of its nanie 
but one ritual element is quite certain. Goats and a dog wae 
sacrificed, two youths girt themselves in the skins. of the slain 
goats, they held in their hands strips of the hides of the victims. 
They ran round a certain prescribed portion of the city, and as 
they ran smote the women they met with the strips of skin. 
These strips of skin were among the things known as /februa, 
purifiers, and by their purifying power they became fertility 
charms. 

‘Forget not in your speed, Antonius, 2 
To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say 

The barren touchéd in this holy chase 

Shake off their sterile curse!’ 

There has been much needless discussion as to whether in cere- 
monies where striking and beating occur the object is to drive out 
evil spirits or to stimulate the powers of fertility. Primitive man 
does not so narrowly scrutinize and analyse his motives. To strike 
with a sacred thing, whether with a strip of skin from a victim or 
a twig from a holy tree, was to apply what the savage of to-day 
would call ‘good medicine.’ Precisely how it worked, whether by 
expulsion or impulsion, is no business of his. 

When the Catholic makes the sacred sign of the Cross over 
his food, is he, need he be quite clear as to whether he does it to 
induce good or to exorcise evil? The peasant mother of to-day 
may beat her boy partly with a view to stirring his dormant moral 
impulses, but it is also, as she is careful to explain, with intent to 
‘beat the mischief out of him. In the third Mime of Herondas? 
the mother is explicit as to the expulsive virtue of beating. Her 
boy is a gambler and a dunce, so she begs the schoolmaster to 


‘Thrash him upon his shoulders till his spirit, 


3ad thing, is left just hovering on his lips,’ 


1 Julius Caesar, Act 1. Se, 2, v. 6. 
* Herond. Mim. ut. 3. 


ao. The Lupercalia 55 


She is in the usual primitive dilemma: his spirit is bad but it 
is his life; it is kill and cure. 

The strips of goat-skin were februa', purifying, and thereby 
fertility charms. As such they cast sudden illumination on the 
‘magic fleece’ already discussed. The animal sacrificed, be it 
sheep or goat or dog, is itself a placation to ghosts or underworld 
powers ; hence its skin becomes of magical effect: the deduction 
is easy, almost inevitable. The primary gist of the sacrifice is to 
appease and hence keep off evil spirits; it is these evil spirits that 
impair fertility: in a word purification is the placation of ghosts. 

The question ‘ What was purity to the ancients?’ is thus seen 
to be answered almost before it is asked. Purity was not spiritual 
purity in our sense—that is foreign to any primitive habit of thought, 
nor was it physical purity or cleanliness—it was possible to be 
covered from head to foot with mud and yet be ceremonially pure. 
But so oddly does the cycle of thought come round, that the purity 
of which the ancients knew was, though in a widely different sense, 
spiritual purity, ie. freedom from bad spirits and their maleficent 
influence. To get rid of these spirits was to undergo purification. 
In the month of February and Anthesterion the Roman or Greek 
might, mutatis mutandis, have chanted our Lenten hymn: 


‘Christian, dost thou see them 
On the holy ground 
How the hosts of Midian 
Prowl and prowl around ? 
Christian, up and smite them!’ 
Till the coming of the new religion of Dionysos, the Greek 
notion of purity seems not to have advanced beyond this negative 
combative attitude, this notion of spiritual forces outside and 


against them. 


The question yet remains ‘Why did this purification need to 
take place in the spring?’ The answer is clear. Why did our own 
near ancestors have spring cleanings? 

‘Winter rains and ruins are over 


And all the season of snows and sins, 
= * * # - * = 


While in green underwood and cover 
Blossom by blossom the Spring begins.’ 


1 Sery. ad Verg. Aen. vit. 343 nam pellem ipsam capri veteres februwm vocabant. 
Varro (Ling. Lat. v1. 13) says that februwm was Sabine for purgamentum, 


54 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


Winter is a reckless time with its Christmas and its Saturnalia. 
There is little for the primitive agriculturist to do and less to fear. 
The fruits of the earth have died down, the gods have done their 
worst. But when the dead earth begins to awake and put forth 
bud and blossom, then the ghosts too have their spring time, 
then is the moment to propitiate the dead below the earth. Ghosts 
were placated that fertility might be promoted, fertility of the 
earth and of man himself. 

It is true that the primitive rites of February and Anthesterion, 
of Romans and Greeks, were in the main of ‘riddance.’ The ghosts, 
it would seem from the ritual of the Choes and Chytroi, the chew- 
ing of buckthorn, anointing with pitch, the mandate to depart, 
were feared as evil influences to be averted; but there is curious 
evidence to show that at the time of the Anthesteria the 
coming of the ghosts was regarded as a direct promotion of 
fertility. Athenaeus?, quoting the Commentaries of Hegesander?, 
tells us of a curious tradition among the natives of Apollonia in 
Chalkis. ‘Around Apollonia of Chalkidike there flow two rivers, the 
Ammites and the Olynthiacus and both fall into the lake Bolbe. 
And on the river Olynthiacus stands a monument of Olynthus, 
son of Herakles and Bolbe. And the natives say that in the 
months of Elaphebolion and Anthesterion the river rises because 
Bolbe sends the fish apopyris to Olynthus, and at that season an 
immense shoal of fish passes from the lake to the river Olynthus. 
The river is a shallow one, scarcely overpassing the ankles, but 
nevertheless so great a shoal of the fish arrives that the in- 
habitants round about can all of them lay up sufficient store of 
salt fish for their needs. And it is a wonderful fact that they 
never pass by the monument of Olynthus. They say that formerly 
the people of Apollonia used to perform the accustomed rites to 
the dead in the month of Elaphebolion, but now they do them in 
Anthesterion, and that on this account the fish come up in those 
months only in which they are wont to do honour to the dead.’ 
Here clearly the dead hero is the source of national wealth, the 
honours done him are the direct impulsion to fertility. The 
gloomy rites of aversion tend to pass over into a cheerful, hope- 
ful ceremonial of ‘ tendance,’ 


1 Athen. vu. 11 § 384 ¥. 2 3rd cent. B.o, 


11] Placation of Ghosts 55 


To resume, the Anthesteria was primarily a Feast of All 
Souls: it later’ became a revel of Dionysos, and at the revel men 
wreathed their cups with flowers, but, save for a vague and un- 
scientific etymology, we have no particle of evidence that the 
Anthesteria was ever a Feast of Flowers. The transition from 
the revocation of ghosts with its dire association to a drunken 
revel may seem harsh, but human nature is always ready for the 
shift from Fast to Feast, witness our own Good Friday holiday. 


THE RiTuaL OF ‘Evayiopoi. 


In the light of the ceremonies of the spring month February 
and Anthesterion, it is now possible to advance a step in the under- 
standing of Greek ritual terminology and through it of Greek 
religious thought. 

In the first chapter the broad distinction was established 
between sacrifice to the Olympians of the upper air—sacrifice 
which involved communion with the worshipper, and sacrifice to 
chthonic powers which forbade this communion—in which the 
sacrifice was wholly made over to the object of sacrifice. The 
first, the Olympian sacrifice, is expressed by two terms, @vew and 
ltepevety ; the second, if the sacrifice is burnt, by oXoxavutety, and 
as will presently be seen by ogafevv, also more generally by the 
term évayiferr. 

As regards the Olympian terms, it is only necessary to say 
definitely what has already been implied, that @vey strictly is 
applicable only to the portion of the sacrifice that was actually 
burnt with a view to sublimation, that it might reach the gods in 
the upper air; whilst (epevecv applies rather to the portion unburnt, 
which was sacred indeed, as its name implies, to the gods, but 
was actually eaten in communion by the worshipper. With the 
growing prevalence of burnt sacrifice and the increasing popu- 
larity of the Olympians and their service, the word @vew came 
to cover the whole field of sacrifice, and in late and careless 
writers is used for any form of sacrifice burnt or unburnt without 
any consciousness of its primary meaning. 

The term (epevev is strictly used only of the sacrifice of an 


1 That the religion of Dionysos came to Greece at a comparatively late date will 
be shewn in Chapter vu. 


56 The Anthesteria (CH. 


animal ; (epefov is the animal victim. Among the Homeric Greeks 
sacrifice and the flesh feast that followed were so intimately con- 
nected that the one almost implied the other; the ‘epetov, the 
animal victim, was the material for the cpeodacaia, the flesh feast. 
So prominent in the Homeric mind was the element of feasting 
the worshipper that the feast is sometimes the only stated object. 
Thus Odysseus’ gives command to Telemachus and his thralls: 


‘Now get you to my well-built house, the best of all the swine 
Take you and quickly sacrifice that straightway we may dine.’ 

Here the object is the meal, though incidentally sacrifice to 
the gods is implied. It is not that on the occasion of sacrifice 
to the gods man solemnly communicates, but that when man 
would eat his fill of flesh food he piously remembers the gods and 
burns a little of it that it may reach them and incline their hearts 
to beneficence. 

In the Homeric sacrifice there is communion, but not of any 
mystical kind; there is no question of partaking of the life and 
body of the god, only of dining with him. Mystical communion 
existed in Greece, but, as will be later seen, it was part of the 
worship of a god quite other than these Homeric Olympians, the 
god Dionysos. 

Before we leave the (epeiov, the animal sacrificed and eaten, 
one word of caution is necessary. It is sometimes argued that 
animal sacrifice, as contrasted with the simpler offerings of grain 
and fruits, is the mark of a later and more luxurious civilization. 
Such was the view of Porphyry? the vegetarian. Flesh-eating and 
flesh sacrifice is to him the mark of a cruel and barbarous licence. 
Such too was the view of Eustathius*, In commenting on the 
ovroyvTat, the barley grain scattered, he says, ‘after the offering 
of barley grain came sacrifices and the eating of meat at sacrifices, 
because after the discovery of necessary foods the luxury of a meat 
diet and imported innovations in food were invented. As a 
generalization this is false to facts; it depends on the environment 
of a race whether man will first eat vegetable or animal food; but 
as regards the particular case of the Greeks themselves, the obser- 


1 Od. xxiv. 215 
detrrvov 6’ alWa ovdy lepedoare bs Tis apioros. 
2 Porph. de Abst. 11. passim. 
3 Bust. ad Il. 1. 449 § 1382 wera dé ras o'AoXUTas al Ovoia Kal H év adrais 
Kpewparyla dibre kal wera Thy TOV dvayKalwy Tpoday eiperw 7 THs Kpewdaiclas mo\uTéAeca 
Kal To THs Tpopis éweloaxrov elipyrat. i 


ay Pr Placation of Ghosts 57 


vations of Porphyry and Kustathius are broadly true. The primitive 
dwellers in Greece and round the Mediterranean generally lived 
mainly on vegetarian diet, diversified by fish, and the custom of 
flesh-eating in large quantities was an innovation brought from 
without! (émeigaxrov). Athenaeus’ in his first book discusses the 
various kinds; of food, and dwells with constant astonishment on 
the flesh-eating habits of the Achaean heroes of Homer. He 
quotes the comic poet EKubulos as asking 


*, pray you, when did Homer ever make 
An Achaean chief eat fish? ’tis always flesh, 
‘And roasted too, not boiled.’ 

Achaean chiefs, he notes—and in this they resemble their 
northern descendants—‘ do not care for made-dishes, kickshaws 
and the like. Homer sets before them only roast meat, and for 
the most part beef, such as would put life into them, body and 
soul. It is true Athenaeus is arguing about the simplicity of the 
Homeric 1s contrasted with later Greek life, but the fact he states 
is beyond dispute, ie. that the Homeric diet was mainly of flesh 
and unkke the vegetarian and fish diet of the ordinary Greek. 
Given a flesh diet for man, and the sacrifice of flesh to the gods he 
makes in his own image follows. 

The terms Ovevv and igpevery belong then to sacrifice regarded 
as a feast ; it remains to consider the term évayifeuv, in the definition 
of which we come, I think, to the fullest understanding of the 
ideas of the lower stratum of Greek religion. 

First it is necessary to establish the fact that in usage the 
terms Ovew and évayifery are clearly distinguished. A passage in 
Pausanias is for this purpose of capital importance. Pausanias 1s 
visiting a sanctuary of Heracles at Sicyon. He makes the follow- 
ing observations*: ‘In the matter of sacrifice they are accustomed 

1 Prof. Ridgeway (Early Age of Greece, vol. 1. p. 524) has shown (to me 


conclusively) that_these Homeric Achaeans were of Celtic origin and _brough 
them from central Kurope the ; : ating habits of their northern 










alicestors. 
~ 2~#then. 1. 46 § 25. 
3 P. 11. 10. 1 émi 6é rH Ovola Toidde Spay vouifovor. Palcrov év Xixvevia AEeyouvow 
AMbvTa KarahaBe ‘Hpaxdret spas ws npwi évayifovras’ ovKovy jélov Spay ovdév oO 
Paicros Tov adtav, adn’ ws ew OUew. Kal viv re dpva oi Tixvdrioe opdsavtes Kal Tovs 
Knpovds eri ToD Bwuod kavoavtes TA ev éEcOlovow Ws dd iepelou Ta Oe ws Hpwt TOV KpEewv 
évayifovsr. That the distinction between @vew and évayifew is no late invention 
of Pausanias is shown by the fact that Herodotos (11. 43) uses the same words and 
draws the same distinction though with less explicit detail. Speaking of Herakles 
as god and hero, he says: 7@ mév dbavdrw ’OduuTip dé éravuulyy Pvovot, TED ETEpY 
@s jpwe éevaryifovar. 


58 The Anthesteria , [ CH. 


to do as follows. They say that Phaestos, when he came to 
Sicyon, found the Sicyonians devoting offerings to Heracles as to 
a hero. But Phaestos would do nothing of the kind, but would 
sacrifice to him as to a god. And even now the Sicyonians, when 
they slay a lamb and burn the thighs upon the altar, eat a portion 
of the flesh as though it were a sacrificial victim, anil another part 
of the flesh they make over as to a hero. The passage is not 
easy to translate, because we have no English equivalent for 
évayitew. I have translated the word by ‘devote’ because it 
connotes entire dedication—part of the sacrifice is shared, eaten 
by the worshipper in common with Heracles regarded as a god, the 
other part is utterly consecrated to Heracles as a hero; it is dead 
men’s food. Pausanias, who is often careless in his use of @veur, 
here carefully marks the distinction. The victim is an animal: 
part of it is offered to an Olympian—that portion is shared ; part: 
of it is offered, like the offerings at the Chytroz, to no Olympian, 
but to a ghost, and of that portion no man eats. : 

A second passage from Pausanias adds a further element of 
differentiation. At Megalopolis, Pausanias visited a sanctuary of 
the Eumenides. Of their ritual he speaks as follows!: ‘They say 
that when these goddesses would drive Orestes mad they appeared 
to him black, but that after he had bitten off his finger_they 
seemed to him w hite, and his senses retumed to him, and there- 
Se emiecvaran offering to the black goddesses to turn away 
their wrath, but to the white ones he did sacrifice.’ 

Language and ritual could scarcely speak more plainly: @Qvew 
is to the Olympians, a joyous thanksgiving to gods who are all 
white and bright, beneficent, of the upper air; évayifevy is to those 
below who are black and bad and malignant : @vew is for Oeparreia, 
tendance ; évayifew for amotpo7n, riddance. 


The distinction between the two forms of ritual having been 
thus definitely established, it remains to examine more closely the 
word évayifevv and the ritual it expresses, that of the dead—a ritual 
which, it must at this point be remembered, is also concerned 
with purification. 

The word évayifew can only mean the making of or dealing 


1 P. vit. 34. 3 Kai obrw rats wey (rais wedalvas) éviyier, Foe Gs TO wenvewa 
a’rév, tals dé &Ovce rais \evKais. 





I] | Placation of Ghosts 59 


with something that is of the nature of an dyos, or, as the word 
sometimes appears, a dyos. It did not escape that acute observer 
of man and his language, Archbishop Eustathius?, that this word 
and its cognate ayvos, holy, had in ancient days a double 
significance, that holy was not only pure but also polluted ; this, 
he says, ‘1s on account of the double meaning of ayos.’ To put 
the matter into modern phraseology, ayos is the thing that is 
taboo, the thing consecrated to the gods, and hence forbidden to 
man, the thing ‘devoted’ The word lies deep down in the ritual 
of ancient sacrifice and of ancient religious thought; it is the 
very antithesis of communion; it is tinged with, though not quite 
the equivalent of, expiation. 

Fortunately we are not left to conjecture as to what was the 
precise nature of the ceremonies covered by the word évayifeu. 
We know what was done, though we have no English word fully 
to express that doing. This fact may well remind us that we have 
lost not only the word but the thought, and must be at some pains 
to recover it. In the discussion that follows no translation of 
evayitew will be attempted: I shall frankly use the Greek word 
and thereby avoid all danger from misleading modern conno- 
tations’, 

Quite accidentally, in the middle of a discourse on the various 
sorts of soap and washing basins, Athenaeus* has preserved for us 
a record of the exact ritual of évay:owot. After stating that the 
word azovimtpov, washing off, is applied alike to the water in 
which either feet or hands are washed, he goes on to note that the 
word azoviupa, ‘offscouring, slightly different in form but sub- 

1 Eust. ad Il. xxr11. 429, 1357. 59 ottw cal ayios mapa Tots madacois od jedvov O 
kabapos GANG Kal 6 puapds dia 7d TOU ayous SimdAdonLOV. 

2 I do not deny that the word can be translated if we are content to vary our 
rendering in each various case. In the passages already discussed ‘devote’ is 
perhaps a fair equivalent, because the contrast emphasized is with a sacrifice 
shared. Sometimes the word may be rendered simply ‘sacrifice to the dead,’ 
sometimes ‘ purificatory sacrifice,’ sometimes ‘expiatory sacrifice.’ No one word 
covers the whole field. It is this lost union of many diverse elements that has 
to be recovered and is nameless. 

3 Athen. 1x. 78 § 409k ff. idiws 5€ KaNeirar wap’ ’AOnvains drovimua emt Tay els 
Tiny Tots veKpots ywoudvwy Kal éri T&v Tovs évayets KaacpovTwy ws Kal KXeldnuos év Tw 
ércypapouévy "Eénynrix@. Ipodeis yap epi évayiopav ypape tade* ‘"Oputar Boduvov 
mpds égmépav Tov ojuatos. “Emecra mapa tov Bdduvov mpos éomépay Bére, Vdwp Karaxee, 
héywr tdde° ““Tuiv dréviynpa ols yp Kal ols Oéus.’ “Emecra abfis pipov xardxee.” 
IlapéOero taira kat Awpd0cos gdckwy Kai év Trois Evrarpiddy matpios Tdde yeypap9at 
mepl THs Tov ixerwv Kabapoews. “Erect” drovipdpevos alirds kal oi Ada of oTAaYXVEVOVTES, 


- zs : : arcu ee Ns iy 
tdwp AaBav KaGatpe amdvive TO alua Tov Kafaipouévou Kai peTa TO aToviA avaKWITAS 
els TavTO &yxeE. 


60 The Anthesteria [ OH. 


stantially the same in meaning, has among the Athenians a technical 
ritual usage. ‘The term drdévippa is specially applied to the 
ceremonies in honour of the dead and to those that tale place in the 
purification of the polluted.’ The word translated ‘polluted’ is 
évayeis, Le. under or in a state of dyos. He then proceeds to quote 
from a lost treatise on ceremonies of évayio nos, the exact details 
of the ritual. ‘ Kleideimos, in his treatise called Exegeticus, writes 
on the subject of évaysopoi as follows: “ Dig a trench to the west 
of the tomb. Then, look along the trench towards the west, pour 
down water, saying these words: A purification for you to whom it 
is meet and right. Next pour down a second time myrrh.” 
Dorotheos adds these particulars, alleging that the following 
prescription is written also in the ancestral rites of the Eupatridae 
concerning the purification of suppliants: “Next having washed 
himself, and the others who had disembowelled the victim having 
done the same, let him take water and make purification and wash 
off the blood from the suppliant who is being purified, and after- 
- wards, having stirred up the washing, pour it into the same place.”’ 

The conjoint testimony of the two writers is abundantly clear: 
either alone would have left us in doubt as to the real gist of the 
ceremony. Kleidemos tells us that it was addressed to the dead ; 
the trench near the tomb, the western aspect of the setting sun, 
the cautious formulary, ‘To you to whom it is meet and right,’ all 
tell the same tale. It is safest not even to name the dead, lest 
you stir their swift wrath. But Kleidemos leaves us in the dark 
as to why they want an daévippa, ‘an offscouring,’ water defiled: 
why will not pure water or water and myrrh suffice? Dorotheos 
supplies the clue—those who have slain the victim wash the blood 
from their hands and wash it off him who has been purified, and 
then stirring it all up pour it into the trench. The ghost below 
demands the blood of the victim washed off from the polluted 
supplant: when the ghost has drunk of this, then, and not till 
then, there is placation and purification. 

That the ghost should demand the blood of the victim is 
natural enough ; the ghosts in the Nekuia of the Odyssey ‘drink 
the black blood’ and thereby renew their life; but in ceremonies of 
purification they demand polluted water, the ‘offscourings,’ and 
why? The reason is clear. The victim is a surrogate for the 
polluted suppliant, the blood is put upon him that he may be 





11] Placation of Ghosts 61 


identified with the victim, the ghost is deceived and placated. 
The ghost demands blood, not to satisfy a physical but so to speak 
a spiritual thirst, the thirst for vengeance. This thirst can only 
be quenched by the water polluted, the ‘offscourings’! of the 
suppliant. 

The suppliant for purification in the ritual just described was 
identified with the victim, or rather perhaps we should say the 
victim with the suppliant, by pouring over the suppliant the 
victim’s blood. There were other means of identification. It has 
already been seen (p. 27) that the suppliant sometimes put on the 
whole skin of the victim, sometimes merely stood with his foot on 
the fleece. Another and more attenuated form of identification was 
the wearing of fillets, Le. strands of wool confined at intervals by 
knots to make them stronger. Such fillets were normally worn by 
suppliants and by seers: the symbolism for_suppliants is obvious, 
for seers evident on a closer inspection. | The seer himself was 
powerless, but he could by the offering of a sacrifice to ghosts or 
heroes invoke the mantic dead; he wears the symbols of this 
sacrifice, the wreath and the fillets. Later their significance was 
forgotten, and they became mere symbols of office. The omphalos 
at Delphi, itself a mantic tomb, was covered with a net-work of 
wool-fillets, renewed no doubt at first with the offering of each 
new victim, later copied in stone*, but always the symbol of 
recurring sacrifice. _\ 

Fillets of wool became as it were the attributes of the sacri- 
ficial victim. In the curious vase-painting® in fig. 8 Salmoneus, 
himself the victim, is wreathed, decorated all over with fillets, which 
of course, as there was no animal slain, are merely symbolic*. Animal 
victims in like fashion are adorned for sacrifice with these merely 
routine fillets. The animal sacrifice is to the ghost the surrogate 
of the human victim, the fillet in its turn the surrogate of the 
animal. 

The dread ceremonial of évaysopos in its crudest, most 


1 Hesych. Noutpév* 70 pUrapor tdwp your amévimma. 
2 Bull. de Corr. Hell. xxtv. p. 258. 

’ 3 Now in the Museum at Chicago. American Journal of Archaeology, 1899, 
pl. tv. The vase presents some difficulties, the discussion of which would be 
irrelevant here. The figure of Salmoneus madly and sacrilegiously counterfeiting 
Zeus and holding his thunder-bolt is I think certain. 

4 Fillets are specially characteristic of sacrificial victims. Herodotus vi. 197 
describes Athamas as oréupact ruxacéels. 


62 The Anthesteria [ OH. 


barbarous form, is very clearly shown on the vase-painting in 





CeooceeeerveecaceeeF®See22 eG erone 
SOCHCOSCTEEEOCHH ESS OCHS HEHE ECELESECE OOS 
@eeeee eee eee ee eS Seoeoeseseeeeseeovees 











fig. 9, from a ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora now in the British 
Museum'. The scene depicted is the sacrifice of Polyxena on the 
tomb of Achilles. In the Hecuba of Euripides’, Neoptolemos 





1 Published by Mr H. B. Walters, J.H.S. xvirr. 1898, p. 281, pl. xv. The class 
of vases known sometimes.as ‘Tyrrhenian,’ sometimes as Corintho-Attic, all belong 
to the same period, about the middle of the sixth century b.c., and are apparently 
from the same workshop. 

* Hur, Hec. 585. 


1] Placation of Ghosts 63 


takes Polyxena by the hand and leads her to the top of the 
mound, pours libations to his father, praying him to accept the 
‘soothing draughts, and then cries 


‘Come thou and drink the maiden’s blood 
Black and unmixed.’ 


In the centre of the design in fig. 9 is the omphalos-shaped 
grave!, which is in fact the altar. Right over it the sacrifice takes 
place. Neoptolemos, as next of kin to the slain man, is the 
sacrificer ; Polyxena, as next of kin to the slayer, is the sacrifice. 
The ghost of the slain man drinks her blood and is ee and 
thereby the army is purged. 

The blood only is offered to the ghost—the blood is the life, 
and it is vengeance, not food, the ghost cries for. It is so with the 
Erinyes, who are but angry ghosts?; when they hunt Orestes they 
cry’, 

‘The smell of human blood smiles wooingly.’ 
Earth polluted has drunk a mother’s blood, and they in turn 
‘Will gulp the living gore red from his limbs‘ 


- When the ghost of Achilles has drunk the fresh blood of the 
maiden her body will be burnt, not that it may rise as a sweet 
savour to the gods above, but as a holocaust; it is a @ucla 
adairos, ‘a sacrifice without feast. It will be burnt on the low- 
lying eschara or portable hearth that stands on the grave. The 


eschara was by the ancients clearly distinguished from the altar, 


proper, the Bwpos. The eschara, says the scholiast on the 
Phoenissae’ of Euripides, is ‘accurately speaking the trench in the 
earth where they offer évaysopoi to those who are gone below; the 
altar is that on which they sacrifice to the heavenly gods.’ 

Porphyry’, who is learned in ritual matters, draws the same 
distinction. ‘To the Olympian gods they set up temples and 
images and altars, but to the Earth-gods and to heroes, escharas, 
while for those below the earth there are trenches and megara.’ 

’ 1 Omphalos and tomb are in intent the same, see J.H.S. xrx. p. 225. 

2 The genesis of the Erinys is discussed later, in Chapter v. 

3 Aesch. Hum. 253. 4 Aesch. Eum. 264. 

5 Schol. ad Hur. Phoen. 284 diapéper Buds Kal éoxdpa. ad 274 éoxapa pev Kupiws 


6 émi Tis yas BoOpos évOa évaryigovor Tois KaTw épxomevos, Bwuos 5€ Ev @ BUouvse Tots 
émoupaviots Geots. 

® Porph. de antr. nymph. 3 Tots pev ’Odvuptrios Beots vaovs TE Kai en kal Bwovs 
idpicavto, xOovios dé Kal jpwow éoxapas, troxoviots 5€ BdPpovs Kai wéyapa. The 
megara will be discussed later (p. 125). 


64 The Anthesteria [ CH. 


It is on an eschara that Clytaemnestra does her infernal service 
to the Erinyes'. She cries to them in bitter reproach : 


‘How oft~have ye from out my hands licked up 
Wineless libations, sober offerings, 

And on the hearth of fire banquets grim 

By night, an hour unshared of any god!’ 


Her ritual was the ritual of the underworld abhorred of the 
Olympians. 

The eschara on which the holocaust to the underworld gods is 
burnt lies low upon the ground; the Bapos, the altar of the 
Olympians, rises higher and higher heavenwards. There is the 
like symbolism in the actual manner of the slaying of the victim. 
Eustathius?, in commenting on the sacrifice of Chryses to Phoebus 
Apollo, when they ‘drew back the victims’ heads,’ says ‘according 
to the custom of the Greeks, for if they are sacrificing to those 
above they bend back the neck of the sacrificial animal so that it 
may look away towards the sky, but if to heroes or to the dead in 
general the victim is sacrificed looking downwards.’ Eustathius* 
again says of the prayer of Achilles, ‘by looking heavenwards he 
expresses vividly whither the prayer is directed, for Achilles is not 
praying to Zeus of the underworld, but to Zeus of the sky.’ The 
Christian of to-day, though he believes his God is everywhere, yet 
uplifts his hands to pray. For the lke reason the victim for the 
dead was black and that for the Olympians frequently white ; that 
for the dead sacrificed at the setting of the sun, that for the 
Ouranians at the dawn*. Upon certain holocausts, as has already 
been seen, the sun might, not look. 

The ritual of the évayouor is then of purgation by placation 
of the spirits of the underworld. The extreme need of primitive 
man for placation is from the stain of bloodshed; purgation from 
-this stain is at first only obtained by the offering of the blood of 
the murderer himself, then by the blood of a surrogate victim 
applied to him. 

It is, I think, probable that at the back of many a mytho- 
logical legend that seems to us to contain what we call ‘human 
sacrifice’ there hes, not the slaying of a victim for the pleasure of 
a Moloch-like god, but simply the appeasement of an angry ghost. ~ 


1 Aesch, Hum. 106. 

* Eustath. ad Jl. 1. 459 § 134. 8 Kustath. § 1057, 37. 

4 Schol. ad Apoll. Rhod. 1. 587 rots pwev obv xarorxouévors ws wept pAlou SuoTmas 
évaylfouor rots dé obpavidats bd Thy Ew, dvaréAdNovTos Tod HXlov. 


11] Placation of Ghosts 65 


So long as primitive man preserves the custom of the blood-feud, 
so long will he credit his dead kinsman with passions like his own 


In this connection it is interesting to note some further details 
of the ritual terminology of évaysopot as contrasted with that of 
the service of the Olympians. 

The sacrifice burnt that the Olympians may eat of it is Odya, 
the thing burned to smoke; the sacrificial victim slain to be 
eaten by the worshipper is ‘epetov; the victim slain for placation 
and purification is by correct authors called by another name, it is 
a opayov, a thing slaughtered. The word explains itself: it is not 
the sacrifice burnt, not the sacred thing killed and carved for 
a meal, but simply the victim hacked and hewn to pieces. Such 
a victim was not even necessarily skinned. Of what use to care- 
fully flay a thing doomed to utter destruction? In the Hlectra of 
Euripides! the old man describes such a ofayiov: 


‘I saw upon the pyre with its black fleece 
A sheep the victim, and fresh blood outpoured.’ 


It is interesting to note in this connection that the word 
oddyov is always used of human victims, and of such animals as 
were in use as surrogates. The term is applied to all the famous 
maiden sacrifices of mythology. Jon? asks Creousa: 

‘And did thy father sacrifice thy sisters ?’ 
And Creousa with greater ritual precision makes answer : 
‘He dared to slay them as sphagia for the land.’ 


As a oddytov Polyxena’ is slain on the tomb of Achilles; she 
dies as an atonement, a propitiation, as ‘medicine of salvation.’ 

The normal and most frequent use of o@dyca was, as in the 
case of évaysouot in general, for purification by placation. In 
stress of great emergency, of pestilence, of famine, and throughout 
historical times at the moment before a battle, odayia were 
regularly offered. They seem to have been carried round or 
through the person or object to be purified. Athenaeus* records 


1 Kur. El. 514. 
2 Kur. Jon 277 
IQ. marinp Epexdebs cas @Ovce cvyydsvous ; 
KP. &r\n mpd yalas opdyia mapbévous Kravew. 
° Hur. Hec. 121 riuBw ofpdyor. 
4 Athen. xiv. 22 § 626 xafapudy THs rodews ErorjoavTo opdryia TepidyovTes KUKY 
THS Xwpas aTaons. 


1815, 9) 


> The Anthesteria [CH. 


an instructive instance. The inhabitants of Kynaetho, a village in 
Arcadia, neglected the civilizing influences of dancing and feasting, 
and became so savage and impious that they never met except for 
the purpose of quarrelling. They perpetrated at one time a great 
massacre, and after this, whenever thei emissaries came to any 
other of the Arcadian cities, the citizens by public proclamation 
bade them depart, and the Mantineans after their departure made 
a purification of the city, leading the slaughtered victims round 
the whole circuit of the district. 

As purifications the use of opdyia needs no further comment. 
It is less obvious at first why o@dyia were always employed in the 
taking of oaths. The expression téuvew opdyra is the equivalent 
of the familiar téuvew opxia. In the Suppliants of Euripides? 
Athene says to Theseus: 


‘Hearken whereinto thou must cut the sphagia.’ 


She then bids him write the oaths in the hollow of a tripod- 
cauldron and then cut the throats of the victims into the cauldron, 
thus clearly identifying the oaths and the blood. 

In the ordinary ritual of the taking of oaths, the oath-taker 
actually stood upon the pieces of the slaughtered animal. Pausanias’, 
on the road between Sparta and Arcadia, came to a place called 
‘Horse’s Tomb. There Tyndareus sacrificed a horse and made 
Helen’s suitors take an oath, causing them to stand on the cut-up 
pieces of the horse,—having made them take the oath, he buried the 
horse. At Stenyclerum* in Messenia was another monument, called 
‘Boar’s Monument, where it was said Herakles had given an oath 
to the sons of Neleus on the cut pieces of a boar. Nor is the 
custom of swearing on the cut pieces recorded only by mythology. 
In the Bouleuterion at Elis was an image of Zeus, ‘of all others,’ 
says Pausanias*, ‘best fitted to strike terror into evildoers.’ Its 

1 Hur. Supp. 1296 év @ 6é réuve rede xp o° adKové “ov. 

ame, rit. 20.9: oP. Iv. 15. 8 

4 P.v. 24. 10 rots ve dpxavorépors éml lepelw jv KabeornKds €d’ @ TLs SpKiov exveheate 
pie DisBinoy elvat rovr’ ért dvOpwrw. Strictly speaking Pausanias ought to have 
written éri odaylw, but his meaning is sufficiently clear. réuca are actually opayia, 
not lepeta. Hustathius, in discussing the sacrifice of Odysseus to the ghosts in the 
Nekuia, makes the following statement: 68rv ‘Owhpou elaévros lepyua Ta év “Avdov 
opdyia éml xo7 vekpav pacly ol madavol ovK pdas elpijo@at rovTo, émt yap vexpdy roma 
pact kal évroua, éri dé Oewy lepeta. Pausanias in the passage cited above (11. 20. 9) 
uses Ovew where opayidserPac would be more correct. He makes a sort of climax 
of confusion when, in describing the ritual of the hero Amphiaraos, he says 


(1. 34. 5): éori dé Kabépatov T@ Oe Ovev, When he should have said r@ jpur opayid- 
Fer Oa. 


11 Placation of Ghosts 67 


surname was Horkios, He of the Oath. Near this image the 
athletes, their fathers, brothers, and trainers had to swear on the 
cut pieces of a boar that they would be guilty of no foul play as 
regarded the Olympian games. Pausanias regrets that he ‘ forgot 
to ask what they did with the boar after the oath had been taken 
by the athletes. He adds,‘ With the men of old days the rule was 
as regards a sacrificial animal on which an oath had been taken 
that it should be no more accounted as eatable for men. Homer, 
he says, ‘shows this clearly, for the boar on the cut pieces of which 
Agamemnon swore that Briseis had not been partner of his bed is 
represented as being cast by the herald into the sea: 
“He spake and with the pitiless bronze he cut 

The boar’s throat, and the boar Talthybios whirled 

And in the great wash of the hoary sea 

He cast it to the fish for food!” 
This in ancient days was their custom about such matters.’ 

The custom of standing on the fragments of the victim points 
clearly to the identification of oath-taker and sacrifice. The victim 
was hewn in bits; so if the oath-taker perjure himself will he be 
hewn in bits: the victim is not eaten but made away with, utterly 
destroyed, devoted; a like fate awaits the oath-breaker: the oath 
becomes in deadly earnest a form of self-imprecation. 

Still less obvious is it why sacrifices to the winds should 
uniformly have taken the form of og@dyia rather than (epeia. At 
first sight the winds if anything would appear to be Ouranian 
powers of the upper air, yet it would appear that sacrifices to the 
winds were buried, not burnt. 

What astonished Pausanias? more than anything else he saw 
at Methana in Troezen was a ceremony for averting the winds. 
‘A wind called Lips, which rushes down from the Saronic gulf, 
dries up the tender shoots of the vine. When the squall is upon 
them two men take a cock, which must have all its feathers white, 
tear it in two, and run round the vines in opposite directions, each 
of them carrying one half of the cock. When they come back to 
the place they start from they bury the cock there. This is the 
device they have invented for counteracting Lips. I myself, 
he adds, ‘have seen the people keeping off hail by sacrifices and 
incantations. The Methanian cock is a typical odayov: it is 


1 Tl. x1x. 265. 2D. tae. 


5—2 


68 The Anthesteria [ CH. 
carried round for purification, the evil influences of the wind are 
somehow caught by it, in rather proleptic fashion, and then buried 
away. It is really -of the order of pharmakos ceremonies, to be 
considered later, rather than a sacrifice proper. For a ogayov 
we should expect the cock to be black, but on the principle of 
sympathetic magic it is in this case white. The normal sacrifice 
to a wind was a black animal. When in the Frogs! a storm is 
brewing between Aeschylus and Euripides, and threatens to burst, 
Dionysos calls out: 

‘Bring out a ewe, boys, bring a black-fleeced ewe, 

- Here’s a typhoon that’s just about to burst.’ 

Winds were underworld gods, but when propitious they had 
a strong and natural tendency to become Ouranian, and the white _ 
sacrifices with intent to compel their beneficence would help this 
out. They are an exact parallel to the black and white Eumenides 
already noted. Virgil? says: 

‘To Storm a black sheep, white to the favouring West.’ 

Equally instructive is the account given by Pausanias* of the 
ceremonies performed at Titane to soothe the winds, though with 
his customary vagueness Pausanias describes them by the word 
@vew when they are really évayiopot. They are performed on one 
night in each year, and Pausanias adds, the priest also ‘does secret 
ceremonies into four pits, soothing the fury of the winds, and he 
chants over them as they say Medea’s charms. Each of the four 
winds dwelt, if is clear, asa chthonic power in a pit; his sacrifice 
was after the fashion of heroes and ghosts. It is possible, indeed 
probable, that the pits were in connection with the tomb of some 
hero or heroine. The sacrifice of Iphigeneia was ravoadveuos*, 
with power to stay the winds; that of Polyxena at the tomb of 
Achilles had the lke virtue. Be that as it may, it will be seen 
when we come to demonology that the winds were regarded as 
ghosts, as breaths : as such their cult was necessarily chthonic. 

Another of their functions og@aya share with the ordinary 
animal-sacrifices, the tepeta. Like the (fepeta they could be used 
for purposes of divination. Used as they were for purification in. 
any great emergency, mere economy may have suggested that they 
should be further utilized for oracular purposes. The greater 

1 Ar, Ran. 847. 2 Virg. Aen. 1. 120. | 
PAB w Rad Ba 4 Aesch. Agam, 214. 


| 11 | Placation of Ghosts 69 


solemnity of oayta would lend to the omens taken from them 
a specially portentous virtue’. It is amusing to find that even 
Porphyry’, averse though he is to human sacrifice, still seems to 
feel a dim possibility that for mantic purposes human entrails may 
have special virtue. ‘But it will be urged, he says, as though 
stating a possible and reasonable argument, ‘that the future may 
be more clearly divined from the vitals of a man.’ 

Precise authors who know about ritual always distinguish 
between the omens taken from ordinary animal sacrifice and 
those from ogaysa. Thus Xenophon* in the Anabasis says, ‘ The 
sacrifices ((epeta) are propitious to us, the omens favourable, the 
opayva most propitious.’ The practice of using odaya for omens 
before a battle would seem to have been uniform. When women, says 
Kteocles*, are wailing and making a commotion, it is the part of men 

* 6To slay the victims, take therefrom the omens ” 
Before the gods, at the onset of the foe.’ 

It is probably to this oracular function of odayia that we 
owe the very frequent use of the middle cdayiafec Oa, as in the 
parallel case of @vewv, the sacrifice by fire.. For @Qvew and @vecOat 
the distinction is familiar, and expressly stated by Ammonius’: 
‘of those who simply sacrifice (active) the victims the word @vover 
is used, of those who take omens from the entrails @vovTat. The 
active is of the nature of thanksgiving, the middle partakes of 
prayer and impulsion. In the case of ogaryia the active is very 
rarely in use, and naturally, for the sacrifice of odaya has in it 
no element of thanksgiving®. 


1 The full and somewhat revolting details as to how omens were taken from 
cpayia do not concern us here; they are given in full by the scholiast on Eur. 
Phoenissae 1255; see P. Stengel, Hermes 1899, xxxiv. p. 642. 

2 Porph. de Abst. 11. 51. 3 Xen. Anab. vi. 5. 21. 

4 Aesch. Sept. 230 

avépwov Tad etl opayta kal Xenor pea 
Geotow Epdew Tohepiwy TELpaLevary, 

5 Ammon. p. 72 Valek. @vovc. wev yap oi opafovres Ta iepeta, Ovovra dé of dia TOV 
oThayXVwV WavTEvovTat. 

6 The question of o¢ayia has been very fully discussed by Dr Paul Stengel in 
four papers as follows: ‘Dq@aya,’ Hermes xxt. p. 307, 1886; ‘Miscellen,’ xxv. 
p- 321; ‘Prophezeiung aus der Yaya,’ xxxt. p. 479 and xxxiv. p. 642. To 
this must be added papers by the same author on évréuvew évroua in the 
Zeitschrift fiir Gymnasial-Wesen 1880, p. 743, and in the Jahrbuch fiir Philologie 
1882, p. 322, and 1883, p. 375, and on the winds, Hermes 1900, p. 626. I owe 
much in the matter of references to Dr Stengel’s full collection of sources, but 
his conclusions as stated in ‘Die Sakralaltertiimer’ (Iwan Miiller’s Handbuch der 
kl. Altertumswissenschaft, Band v. Abt. 3) seem to me to be vitiated by the assump- 
tion that ceremonies of purification are late and foreign importations. 


a eed 


70 The Anthesteria [cH. 


The ritual then of odaqyia and of évaryropol, of slaughter and of 
purification, is based on the fear of ghosts, of ghosts and their 
action on men alive, whether as evil winds, or for dread portents, 
or for vengeance on the broken oath, or, first and foremost, for the 
guilt of shed blood. Its essence is of aToTpoTn, Wversion. 

Nowhere perhaps is this instinct of aversion so clearly seen, seen 
in a form where the instinct has not yet chilled and crystallized 
into definite ritual, as in the account of the murder of Absyrtos 
by Jason and Medea as given by Apollonius Rhodius?. The murder 
was by a treacherous ambuscade set for Absyrtos at the threshold 
of the temple of Artemis; Jason smites him like a bull for 
sacrifice, while Medea stands by. 


‘So by that portal old kneeling he fell, 

And while the last of life yet sobbed and passed, 
Craving, clasped both hands to the wound, to hold 
The dark blood back. But the blood reached, and sprang, 
And, where the veiléd woman shuddered from him, 
Lay red on the white robe and the white veil. 

Then swift a sidelong eye, a pitiless eye, 

The Erinys all subduing, that knoweth Sin, 

Awoke, and saw what manner of deed was there. 
And Aeson’s son smote from that sacrifice 

Red ravine, and three times ravined with his mouth 
Amid the blood, and three times from him spewed 
That horror of sin; as men that slay by guile 

Use, to make still the raging of the dead,’ 


Apollonius tries to make a ritual of the awful instinct of 
physical fear. The body is mangled that the angry ghost may be 
maimed, the blood actually licked up that the murderer may spit 
it forth and rid himself of the fell pollution. Only then can the 
corpse be safely buried*®. But it is too late, for Absyrtos has put 
the blood upon Medea. 

| Clytaemnestra, when she murdered Agamemnon, followed the 


' Apoll. Rhod. ry. 470, trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray. 

2 Since the above was written my attention has been called to Dr J. G. Frazer’s 
paper ‘On certain Burial Customs as illustrations of the primitive theory of the soul’ 
(Journal of Anthropological Institute, vol. xv. 1885-6). After a detailed examination 
of the burial rites and customs of the Greeks and many other peoples Mr Frazer 
reaches the following memorable and to me most welcome conclusion: ‘In general 
I think we may lay down the rule that wherever we find so-called purification by 
fire or water from pollution contracted by contact with the dead we may assume 
with much probability that the original intention was to place a physical barrier of 
fire or water between the living and the dead, and that the conceptions of pollution 
and purification are merely the fictions of a later age invented to explain the purpose 
of a ceremony of which the original intention was forgotten,’ 


= = a = 


i] Placation of Ghosts 74 


same horrid practice of ‘aversion.’ Sophocles! makes Electra 
say: 

‘She lopped his limbs as though he were a foe 

And for libations wiped upon his head 

The blood stains.’ 

By the time of Apollonius the Erinys is no longer the actual 
ghost but a separate spirit of vengeance, and even the primitive 
ritual of aversion is explained as a sort of tendance; the lopped 
limbs are éEapyyara, first beginnings, a sort of hideous sacrifice to 
the murdered man rather than mainly the means of maiming 
him®. But the scholiast* on the Electra clearly explains the gist 
of the ceremonial. He says these things were done ‘as taking 
away the force of the dead so that later they may suffer nothing 
fearful from them.’ 

It may perhaps*be felt that such instances are purely mytho- 
logical, and that fear of the ghost had wholly waned in historical 
times. The horrid practice of mutilation no doubt fell into 
abeyance, but the fear of the ghost and the sense that purification 
from guilt could only be obtained by direct appeal to the ghost 


’ itself lived on. 


The case of Pausanias gives curious evidence as to the 
procedure of an educated murderer of the fifth century B.c. 
Pausanias* the traveller tells how his namesake sought protection 
from the Goddess of the Brazen House, but failed because he 
was defiled by blood. This pollution he tried by every possible 


_means to expiate: he had recourse to purifications of all kinds, he 


made supplication to Zeus Phyxios, a being obviously akin to 
Meilichios—and he resorted to the Psychagogi, the Ghost-Com- 
pellers of Phigalia. They seem to have failed, for Plutarch’ tells 
us he sent to Italy for experts, and they, after they had done 
sacrifice, wrenched the ghost out of the sanctuary. 

The historical case of Pausanias is exactly parallel to that of 
the mythological Orestes. Man expects that the dead man will 
behave as he would behave were he yet living—pursue him for 
vengeance; the ghost is an actual, almost physical reality. It 


1 Soph. El. 445. 

2 The details described by Suidas s.v. éuacyahicOy have a somewhat apocryphal 
air and are probably due to etymology. 

3 Schol. ad Soph. El. 445. 4P Sr. 17.7. ; 

5 Plat. de ser. num. vind. xvit. weraveupbérres of Wuxaywryol Kal GioavTes dweoTa- 
gavTo ToD iepod 7d €idwdov. 





72 The Anthesteria [on 


needed a Euripides to see that this ghost was a purely subjective 
horror, a disordered conscience. He makes Menelaos ask the mad 
Orestes?: i 


‘What dost thou suffer? What disease undoes thee?’ 
and Orestes makes answer: 
‘Conscience, for I am conscious of fell deeds.’ 


Anthropomorphism is usually regarded as a humane trait in 
Greek religion; it is noted as a thing distinguishing their cultus 
from the animal worship of less civilized nations. But anthropo- 
morphism, as is clearly seen in ghost-worship, looks both ways. 
To be human is not necessarily to be humane. Man is cruel and 
implacable, and he makes the ghost after his own image. Man is 
also foolish and easily tricked, so he plays tricks upon the vengeful 
ghost, cheating him of his real meed of the murderer's or kinsman’s 
blood. Hence the surrogate victims, hence the frequent substitu- 
tion stories. Another element enters in. The gods, and specially 
the ghost-gods, are conservative ; man gets in advance of the gods 
he has made, and is ashamed of the rites he once performed with 
complete confidence in their rightness. Then he tries by a cheat 
to reconcile his new view and his old custom. Religion, which once 
inspired the best in him, lags behind, expressing the worst. 25 

Suidas? tells a story which curiously expresses this state of 
transition, this cheating of the god to save the conscience of the 
worshipper. The Greeks had a proverb, "EuPapos eius, ‘I am 
Embaros, which they used, according to Suidas, of a ‘sharp man 
with his wits about him, and, according to one of the collectors of 
proverbs, of those who ‘gave a false impression, Le. were out of 
their minds.’ The origin of the proverb was as follows: There 
was a sanctuary of Artemis at Munychia. A bear came into it 
and was killed by the Athenians. A famine followed, and the god 
gave an oracle that the famine should cease if some one would 
sacrifice his daughter to the goddess. _Embaros was the only man 
who promised to do it, on condition that he and his family should 
have the priesthood for life. He disguised his daughter and hid 


1 Kur, Or, 395 
ME. rl xpiua macxes; tls o dmwd\d\vow vdcos; 
OP. 7 Evveots, bre ctvoda delv’ elpyaomévos, 
2 Suidas s.v. "EuBapds elu, Paroimiograph. 1. 402, App. Cent. and Eustath. ad 
Il. 1, 732 § 331. : 


‘ 


mI] —— Placation of Ghosts 73 


her in the sanctuary, and ‘dressed a goat in a garment and 
sacrificed it as his daughter.’ The story is manifestly aetiological, 
based on a ritual with a hereditary priesthood, and the sacrifice 
of a surrogate goat dressed as a woman. 

It is probable, though not certain, that behind the figure of the 
Olympian Artemis, of the goddess who was kindly to lions’ cubs 
and ‘suckling whelps, there lay the cult of some vindictive ghost 
or heroine who cried for human blood. In moments of great peril 
this belief in the vindictiveness of ghosts, a belief kept in check 
by reason in the day-time, might surge up in a man’s mind and 
haunt his dreams by night. Plutarch! tells an instructive story 
about a dream that came to Pelopidas before the battle of Leuctra. 
Near the field of battle was a field where were the tombs of the 
daughters of Scedasos, a local hero. The maidens, who were 
obviously local nymphs, were called from the place Leuctrides. 
The night before the battle, as Pelopidas was sleeping in his tent, 
he had a vision which ‘caused him no small disturbance.’ He 
thought he saw the maidens crying at their tombs and cursing the 
Spartans, and he saw Scedasos their father bidding him sacrifice 
to his daughters a maiden with auburn hair if he wished to over- 
come his enemies on the morrow. Being a humane as well as 
a pious man, the order seemed to him a strange and lawless one, 
but none the less he told the soothsayers and the generals about 
it. Some of them thought that it ought not to be neglected, and 
brought forward as precedents the ancient instances of Menoiceus, 
son of Creon, and Macaria, daughter of Heracles, and, in more 
recent times, the case of Pherecydes the philosopher, who was put 
to death by the Spartans and whose skin was preserved (no doubt 
as ‘medicine’) by their kings in accordance with an oracle ; also 
the case of Leonidas, who sacrificed himself for Greece ; and, lastly, 
the human victims sacrificed to Dionysos Omestes before the battle 
of Salamis, all which cases had the sanction of success. Moreover, 
they pointed out, Agesilaus, when he was about to set sail from 
Aulis itself, had the same vision as Agamemnon, and disregarding. 
it through misplaced tenderness, came to grief in consequence. 
The more advanced section of the army used the argument of the 
fatherhood of God and the superior nature of the supreme deities ; 
such sacrifices were only fit for Typhons and Giants and inferior 

1 Plut. Vit. Pelop. xxt. 


74 The Anthesteria (eu. 


and impotent demons. Pelopidas, while they were discussing the 
question in the abstract, only got more and more uncomfortable, 
when on a sudden a she-colt got loose from the herd and ran 
through the camp; the laymen present only admired her shining 
red coat, her proud paces and shrill neighing, but Theocritus the 
soothsayer saw the thing in his heart, and cried aloud to 
Pelopidas, ‘Happy man, here is the sacred victim, wait for no 
other maiden, use the one the god has given thee.’ And they took 
the colt and led her to the tombs of the maidens, and prayed and 
wreathed her head and cut her throat and rejoiced and published 
the vision of Pelopidas and the sacrifice to the army. Whether 
Plutarch’s story is matter of fact or not is of little moment; it 
was felt to be probable, or else it would never have been narrated. 


I have purposely dwelt on the dark side of évaysopot, of the 
service of the placation of ghosts, because in the vengeance of the 
ghost exacted for bloodshed lies the kernel of the doctrine of 
purification. But since man’s whole activity is not bounded by 











Fie, 10. 


revenge, ghosts have other and simpler needs than that of ven- 
geance, ‘The service of the underworld is not all aversion, there 
is also some element of tendance. 


11] Placation of Ghosts 75 


In the vase-painting in fig. 10, a design from a rather late 
red-figured krater in the Bibliotheque Nationale’ in Paris, we have 
a representation of a familiar scene, the raising of the ghost of 
Teiresias by Odysseus, as described in the Nekwia. Vase-paintings 
of this date tend to be rather illustrations than independent con- 
ceptions, but they sometimes serve the purpose of vivid pre- 
sentation. Odysseus? has dug the trench, he has poured the 
drink-offering of mead and sweet wine and water, and sprinkled 
the white meal, and he has slain the sheep; the head and feet 
of one of them, seemingly a black ram, are visible above the 
trench. He has sat him down sword in hand to keep off the 
throng of lesser ghosts, and he and his comrades wait the up-rising 
of Teiresias. Out of the very trench is seen emerging the bald 
ghost-like head of the seer. This is a clear case, not of deprecation 
but of invocation. Teiresias by the strength of the black blood 
returns to life. There is a clear reminiscence of the ghost-raising® 
that went on at many a hero’s tomb, for, as will later be seen in 
the discussion of hero-worship, every hero was apt to be credited 
with mantic powers. The victims slain are in a sense, as Homer 
calls them, ‘epyva; they are sacrificed and eaten, but eaten by 
a ghost. As such they have been accompanied by offerings that 
could only be intended for drink-offerings, not the avoviuma, the 
offscourings, but libations of mead and wine and pure water. 
Here again the ghost is made in the image of man: the Homeric 
hero drinks wine in his life and demands it after his death. The 
service of the dead is here very near akin to that of the Olympians; 
it is no grim atonement, but at worst a bloody banquet, at best 
a human feast, too human, too universal to need detailed elucida- 
tion. It is a ritual founded on a belief deep-rooted and long-lived; 
with the Greeks it was alive in Lucian’s‘ days. Charon asks 
Hermes why men dig a trench, and burn expensive feasts, and pour 
wine and honey into a trench. Hermes answers that he cannot 
think what good it can do to those in Hades, but ‘anyhow people 
believe that the dead are summoned up from below to the feast, 
and that they flutter round the smoke and fat and drink the honey 
draught from the trench. Here the ghosts invade the late and 


1 Cat. 422. 2 Od. x1. 23 ff. : ; 
3 For the ceremonials of ghost-raising, see Dr W. G. Headlam, Classical Review, 
1902, p. 52. 


4 Lue. Char. 22. 


76 The Anthesteria [CH. II 


popular burnt sacrifice of the Olympians, but the principle is the 
same. 


The Anthesteria was a festival of ghosts, and so far the 
riddance of ghosts by means of placation has been shown to be an 
important element in ancient sacrifice and in the ancient notion of 
purification. But placation of ghosts does not exhaust the content 
even of ancient sacrifice: another element will appear in the 
festival of early summer that has next to be considered, the 


Thargelia. 


CHAPTER III. 
HARVEST FESTIVALS. 
THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA. 


‘NOIAOPOYMENO! EYAOOYMEN, AIOKOMENOI ANEYOMEDA, BAACHHMOYMENOI 
TIAPAKAAOYMEN © GC TIEPIKAGAPMATA TOY KOCMOY EfeENHOHMEN TIANTOON 
TTEPIPHMA.. 


SPRING-TIME, it has been seen in the last chapter, is the season 
for purification by means of the placation of ghosts. But spring- 
time is not the only anxious time for primitive man. As the year 
wears on, a season approaches of even more critical import, when 
purification was even more imperatively needed, the season of 
harvest ; in the earliest days the gathering in of such wild fruits as 
nature herself provides, in later times the reaping and garnering 
of the various kinds of cereals. 

In the North with our colder climate we associate harvest with 
autumn; our harvest festivals fall at the end of September. 
September was to the Greek the month of the grape harvest, the 
vintage, but his grain harvest fell in ancient days as now in the 
month Thargelion, the latter part of May and the beginning of 
June. This month is marked to the Greeks by three festivals, the 
Thargelia, which gave its name to the month, the Kallynteria, and 
the Plynteria. No festival has been more frequently discussed than 
the Thargelia, and on no festival has comparative anthropology 
thrown more light. The full gist of the ceremony has never, I 
think, been clearly set forth, owing to the simple fact that the 
Thargelia has usually been considered alone, not in connection with 


78 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


the two other festivals'. In the present chapter I shall consider 
first that element in the festival to which it and the month owe 
their names, ie. the first-fruits; second, the ceremony of the 
Pharmakos, which has made the festival famous; third the con- 
nection with the Kallynteria and Plynteria and the hight thrown 
on both by the Roman festival of the Vestalia. Finally from the 
consideration of the gist of these harvest festivals it will be 
possible to add some further elements to our conception of Greek 
religious thought, and especially of the Greek notion of sacrifice. 


THARGELION AND THARGELIA. 


About the meaning’ of the word Thargelia there is happily 
not the slightest doubt. Athenaeus* quotes a statement made by 
Krates, a writer of about the middle of the 2nd century A.D., in his 
book on the Attic dialect as follows: ‘The thargelos is the first 
loaf made after the carrying home of the harvest.’ Now a loaf of 
bread is not a very primitive affair, but happily Hesychius‘ records 
an earlier or at least more rudimentary form of nourishment: 
‘Thargelos, he says, ‘is a pot full of seeds” From Athenaeus?® 
again we learn that the cake called thargelos was sometimes also 
called thalusios. The Thalusia, the festival of the first-fruits of 
Demeter, is familiar to us from the lovely picture in the Seventh 
Idyll of Theocritus®. The friends meet Lycidas the goatherd and 
say to him: 

‘The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way, 
For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day 


The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place 
Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.’ 


1 A. Mommsen (este der Stadt Athen, p. 486) discusses the Thargelia, Kallyn- 
teria and Plynteria in immediate succession, but without a hint of the connection 
of the two last with the first. 

* Vaniéek (s.v. p. 310) derives Oapy7dca, which appears also in the form Tapy/\a, 
from a root rapy meaning ‘hot’ and ‘dry’ and connects it with rpvy in rpicxw, 
tpvydw etc. All these analogous forms have the same meaning, i.e. ‘ripened by 
the sun,’ ‘ready for harvesting.’ 

; * Athen. m1. 52 § 115 @dpyndov KadetoOa rov éx ris ovyKomdis mpOrov yevduevov 
prov. 

+ Hesych. s.v. Odpyndos xUrpa éorlv dvdwhews omepudrwv. 

© loc. cit. supra. 

6 Theoer. Id. v1. 31 & 5’ 660s ade Oadvolas. 


11] Thargelia 79 


Homer’ tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to 
waste the land of the Aetolians, because Oineus their king forgot 
to celebrate the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the 
passage, says: ‘The first-fruits are the thalusia. He adds that 
some of the rhetoricians call the thalusia ‘feasts of the Harvest- 
Home.’ 

It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is 
in the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion of 
harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. Of 
one of these harvest rites, the carrying of the Eiresione?, we have 
unusually full particulars. 

In the Knights of Aristophanes’, Cleon and the Sausage-Seller 
are clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks 
angrily : 


‘Who's bawling there? do let the door alone, 
You've torn my Eiresione all to bits.’ 


The scholiast explains. ‘At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia 
the Athenians hold a feast to Helios and the Horae, and the boys 
carry about branches twined with wool, from which they get the 
name of Hiresiones, and they hang them up before the doors.’ It is 
very probable that the wool (eépos), taken perhaps from a sacred 
animal, gave its name to the Eiresione, but there were many other 
things besides wool hung on the branch. Our fullest account 

comes from the rhetorician Pausanias, who is quoted by Eustathius! 
in his commentary on the liad. LEustathius is explaining that 
the term audiOadys means a child with both parents alive, and he 
adds by way of illustration that children of this sort were chosen 
by the ancients to deck out the Eiresione. He then quotes from 
the works of Pausanias the following account of the ceremony: 


1 Hom. Il. 1x. 534 
6 of of TL Oadvcta yourw addwijs 
Oiveds pee’. 
Eustath. ad loc. @advcva 6é ai dmapxat.. .Twes 6€ TaV pyropwy Kal cvyKouoTHpia Tatra 
KaNovow...é€7t O€ Kat OadUoos dptos 6 EK THS THY KapT&v, Paci, cuyKomudjs mp&ros 
yivomevos. 

2 The sources for the Hiresione are very fully given and discussed by Mannhardt, 
Wald- und Feldkulte, pp. 214—248; see Dr Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd edition, 
vol. 1. p. 190, for modern parallels. 

3 Ar. Eq. 729, schol. ad loc. 

+ Kustath. ad Il. xxir. 496, p. 1283 7pdov dé ratdes 

eipectwvn odKa Péper Kal mlovas dprous 
Kat méActos KoTUAnv Kal éAavov éemixojnoacbac 
kal Kiduka evfwpov iva pedtovoa Kkabevdn. 


- — , 


80 Harvest Festivals / [ CH. 


‘The Eiresione is a branch of olive twined with wool, and having 
hanging from it various fruits of the earth; a boy, both of whose 
parents are alive, carries it forth and places it in front of the doors 
of Apollo’s sanctuary, at the feast of Pyanepsia. He then goes on 
to an aetiological legend about Theseus, and finally records the 
words of the song sung by the children who carried or attended 
the Eiresione : 

‘Eiresione brings 

All good things, 

Figs and fat cakes to eat, 

Soft oil and honey sweet, 

And brimming wine-cup deep 

That she may drink and sleep.’ 

The boy who actually carried the Eiresione must have both 
parents alive, because any contact with death even remote was 
unlucky ; the ghost of either parent might be about. The song is 
of some interest because of the half-personification of Eiresione. 
The Maypole or harvest-sheaf is halfway to a harvest Maiden; it 
is thus, as will be seen later, that a goddess is made. A song is 
sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes the outline of 
personality. It is possible to worship long in spirit, but as soon as 
the story-telling, myth-making, instinct awakes you have anthro- 
pomorphism and theology. 

What was hung on the Eiresione no doubt depended on the 
wealth of particular worshippers; we hear of white wool and 
purple wool, vessels of wine, figs, strings of acorns, cakes; nothing 
in the way of natural produce came amiss. The Eiresione once 
fixed over the door remained there, a charm against pestilence and 
famine, till the next year; then it was changed for a new one. 
The withered branch must have been a familiar sight at Athens. 
When in the Plutus! of Aristophanes the young rough is insulting 
the old woman and thrusting his torch into her withered face, she 
cries : 

‘For pity’s sake don’t bring your torch so near me,’ 
and Chremylus says : 
‘Yes, right she is, for if she caught a spark 


She’d burn up like an old Eiresione.’ 


1 Ar. Plut. 1054, schol. ad loc. ravrny d@ rv elpecudvny mpo rdv olknudrwr 
érlOevro ol ’AOnvaio. Kat Kar’ Eros adrhy HANatTov...€xacros mpd Trav Oupdy éornoav 
elpeguovas els amorpoiy Tov Notwod, Kal diéwever els EviauTdv. jv Kal EnpayOeicay mad 
kar’ €ros érole €répav xodfovcar. 


iit | Hiresione 81 


_ The Hiresione, Pausanias says, was fastened before the door of 
the sanctuary of Apollo. Plutarch’, in his rather clumsy aetio- 
logical account of the Oschophoria, connects the Eiresione with 
vows paid to Apollo by Theseus on his return from Crete to 
Athens. Harpocration® says ‘The Thargelia was celebrated in the 
month of Thargelion, which is sacred to Apollo, and the author of 
the Etymologicon Magnum* states ‘The Thargelia, a festival at 
Athens. The name is given from the thargelia, and thargelia are 
all the fruits that spring from the earth. The festival is celebrated 
in the month Thargelion to Artemis and Apollo” From Suidas* 
we learn that there was a musical contest at the Thargelia, and 
that the actors dedicated their prize tripods in the sanctuary of 
Apollo known as the Pythion. 

All this makes it quite clear that at some time or other the 
festival of the Thargelia was connected with the Olympian Apollo, 
and more vaguely with his sister Artemis, but the connection is 
obviously loose and late. The Eiresione was fastened up not only 
over the door of the sanctuary of Apollo, but over the house-door 
of any and every Athenian. The house of Demos was no sanctuary 
of Apollo. Moreover, when the scholiast on Aristophanes’ is com- 
menting on the Eiresione, he says, to our surprise, that it was 
carried and hung at the Thargelia and Pyanepsia in honour, not of 
Apollo and Artemis, but of ‘Helios and the Horae.’ Porphyry® 
does not definitely name the Eiresione, but he is clearly alluding 
to it when he speaks of the procession that still took place at 
Athens in his own day to Helios and the Horae. It is evidence, 
he says, that in early days the gods desired in their service 
not the sacrifice of animals, but the offermg of vegetable first- 
fruits. ‘In this procession they carried wild herbs as well as 
ground pulse, acorns, barley, wheat, a cake of dried figs, cakes of 
wheat and barley flour, and a pot (yv7pos).’ 

It is abundantly clear that the Hiresione is simply a harvest- 


home, an offering of first-fruits that was primarily an end in itself, 


1 Plut. Vit. Thes. xvi. The account of Plutarch is substantially the same as 
that of his contemporary Pausanias the rhetorician; both appear to draw from some 
common source, which may be Krates’ epi @vowwv: see Mannhardt, Wald- und 
Feldkulte, p. 219. 

2 Harpocrat. s.v. 3 Etym. Mag. s.v. 

4 Suidas s.v. Il’@ov. 5 Schol. ad Ar. Plut. 1054. 

6 Porph. de Abst. 1.7. The text contains obscure words, e.g. eiAvoméa of which 
Nauck observes loci medela nobis negata, but those translated above seem certain. 


H. 6 


82 Harvest Festivals [ OH. 


but that could easily be affiliated to any dominant god. It will be 
remembered’ that Oineus got into trouble because, when all the 
other gods had their feasts of hecatombs, he did not offer first- 
fruits to Artemis, great daughter of Zeus. Oineus, we may con- 
jecture, was the faithful conservative worshipper of earlier gods ; 
the Athenians were wiser in their generation ; their ancient service 
of the primitive Helios and the Horae they somehow affliated to 
that of the incoming Olympians. 


It remains to ask more precisely what was the primitive signifi- 
cance of the offering of first-fruits. At first sight it may seem 
as if the question were superfluous. Surely we have here the 
simplest possible instance of the service of ‘tendance’ (@epazreta), 
the primitive sacrifice that embodies the very essence of do ut des, 
a gift given to the god to ‘smooth his face,’ a gift that necessarily 
presupposes the existence of a god with a face to be smoothed. 

Such seems to have been the view of Aristotle* He says in 
characteristically Greek fashion, ‘They hold sacrifices, and meetings 
in connexion therewith, paying rites of worship to the gods while 
providing rest and recreation for themselves. For the most ancient 
sacrifices and meetings seem to be as it were offerings of first- 
fruits after the gathering in of the various harvests. For those 
were the times of year when the ancients were especially at leisure.’ 
Aristotle clearly takes the view of sacrifice already discussed, that 
sacrifice is mainly an occasion for enjoyment and the result of 
leisure, but his remark as to its early connection with first-fruits 
goes deeper down than he himself knows. Regarded as a @ueia, 
a sacrifice, the offering of first-fruits presupposes, as we have said, 
a god or spirit to whom sacrifice is made, and a god of human 
passions. But it must not be forgotten that in this view we are 
making a very large assumption, i.e. that of the existence of some 
such god or spirit. It is instructive to note that among other 
primitive races ceremonies have been observed which apparently 
are not addressed to any god or spirit, and yet which seem to 
contain in them a possible germ of some idea akin to sacrifice. 


1 Tliad loc. cit. supra. 

? Aristot. Hth. Nic. 1160 0. 1x. 5 @volas re movodvres Kali wept rav’ras ovvddous, Tyuas 
<Te> amovéuovres Tots Oeois kai av’rots dvaravces moplfovres meO HOovijs. al yap 
dpxatat Ovolar cal otvodo dalvovra ylverOar werd Tas TOY Kaprav cuyKoudas olov 
dmapxal. pddvora yap év Tovros éaxdd\afov Tots Katpois. 


mr | Removal of taboo 83 


Such are the ceremonies of the Australian Arunta, observed 
and described in detail by Messrs Spencer and Gillen’. These 
ceremonies, consisting of lengthy and elaborate mummeries, are 
called Intichiuma, and their object seems to be to secure the 
increase of the animal or plant associated with a particular totem. 
The pantomimes enacted seem to be of the nature of sympathetic 
magic, and they are interspersed with chanted invitations to the 
particular plant or animal to be fertile. The point of special 
interest is that the ceremonies are closely connected with certain 
taboos on particular foods. Mr Lang? suggests that the removal 
of the taboo at the time of the Jntichiwma may indicate that the 
necessary ‘close time’ is over. The imposition of the taboo is on 
this showing not due to any primary moral instinct in man, but 
simply a practical necessity if the plant or animal is not to become 
extinct. The removal of the taboo after a suitable lapse of time 
is, if man himself is not to become extinct, equally practical and 
necessary. This sort of taboo is in fact a kind of primitive ‘ game 
law. Philochoros? gives an instance: ‘At Athens,’ he says, ‘a 
prohibition was issued that no one should eat of unshorn lamb on 
the occasion of failure in the breed of sheep.’ If at the end of the 
close time it was customary to eat a little of a plant or animal, 
the eating being accompanied by certain solemn ceremonials, the 
food itself would easily come to be regarded as specially sacred 
and as having sacramental virtue, and the further step would soon 
be taken of regarding it as consecrated to certain spirits or 
divinities. This may have been in part the origin of the offering 
of first-fruits. 

The removal of a taboo is assuredly not the same thing as the 
worship of a god, but it is easy to see how the one might slide over 
into the other. A taboo is by common consent placed upon the 
harvest fruits till all are ripe: such harvest-fruits are sacred, for- 
bidden, dangerous. Why? As soon as primitive man has fashioned 
for himself any sort of god in his own image, the answer is ready, 
‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God.’ Primitive man is so 
instinctively anthropomorphic that it seems to me rash to assert 


1 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 167 fi. 

2 A. Lang, Religion and Magic, p. 265. 

3 Philoch. ap. Athen. 1. 16 § 9 iddxopos dé iorope? Kal Kexwritobar ’APHYyCL 
dméktou dpvos pndéva yeverOar emidurovans mote THS TOV (ewy ToUTWY yEvETEWS. 


6—2 


84 Harvest Festivals [ CH. r 


that the notion of taboo precedes that of sacrifice. The natives of 
Central Australia appear to have taboo without the notion of sacri- 
fice, Le. of any spirit. to whom sacrifice is made; another race might 
have a primitive notion of a spirit to be placated without the 
notion of taboo; or the two might be inextricably blended and only 
our modern habit of pitiless analysis separate them. 

Late writers on ritual, and it is only late that there are such 
writers, always explain taboo as consecration rather than prohibi- 
tion. Festus’ says ‘they called the juice of the vine sacrima because 
they sacrificed (or consecrated) it to Liber with a view to the protec- 
tion of the vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as 
they sacrificed to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first 
reaped. Here the ‘sacramental’ wine is clearly a sacrifice of the 
Olympian kind; but in the Pithoigia, already discussed, the more 
primitive notions of release from taboo and ‘aversion’ of evil 
influences clearly emerge. ‘Libation of the new wine is poured 
out that the use of the magical thing (dapyaxov) may become 
harmless and a means of safety’ In the Thargelia we have no 
definite information as to a solemn eating as well as offerimg of 
first-fruits, but this element will appear when we reach the great 
harvest festival commonly known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. 


It remains to note some details as to the material of sacrifice. 
The general principle is clear and simple. The god fares as his 
worshipper. Porphyry®, in discussing the various kinds of animals 
sacrificed, observes with much common sense, ‘ No Greek sacrifices 
a camel or an elephant to the gods, because Greece does not 
produce camels and elephants.’ 

It might not be necessary to state a fact so obvious but that 
writers on the subject of ritual seem haunted by the notion that 
certain animals are sacrificed to certain gods because they are in 
some mystical sense ‘sacred to them,’ and this notion has intro- 
duced much needless complexity. It is quite true that locally we 
find certain taboos on the sacrifice of certain animals, the cause of 


1 Fest. § 318 sacrima appellabant mustum quod Libero sacrificabant, pro vineis 
et vasis et ipso vino conservando, sicut praemetium de spicis quas primum messuis- 
sent sacrificabant Cereri. 

2 Plut. Q. Symp. mt. 7. 1 cal madae 7’ ws Eorxev etxovro rod olvov mplv 4} meiv 
dmoomévoovres aBaB7 Kal gwrijpiov avrots Tov mapudKkov Thy xphow yevéoOa. 

3 Porph. de Abst. 1. 14, 


ut] Material of sacrifice 85 


which is unknown, but these taboos are local and by no means 
uniform. Moreover the animal ‘sacred’ to the particular god is by 
no means always the material of sacrifice ; the owl, for reasons to 
be later discussed, is ‘sacred’ to Athene, but we hear of no 
sacrifice of owls. Broadly then, as noted before, the material 
of sacrifice is conditioned, not by the character of the god, but by 
the circumstances of the worshipper. 

The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however 
erossed by another, he sometimes fares worse. This was noticed 
by writers on ritual such as Porphyry’ and Eustathius’, and they 
explain it as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, 
dear to the conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the 
gods mirrors, of course, the natural and timid conservatism of their 
worshippers. They have begun by offering just what they eat them- 
selves, and, from the fact that they have once offered it, they attach 
to this food special sanctity. They advance in civilization, and 
their own food becomes more delicate and complex, but they dare 
not make any change in the diet of their gods; they have learnt 
to bake and eat fermented bread themselves, but the gods are still 
nurtured on barley grains and porridge. Porphyry* reduces the 
successive stages of sacrifice to a regular system of progressive 
vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass, which was 
hike the ‘soft wool’ of the earth; then the fruit of trees and their 
leaves, the acorn and the nut; then barley appeared first of the 
grains, and they offered simple barley-corns ; then they broke and 
bruised grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made 
libations first of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared 
for us by bees, thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine; but after 
each advance the older service remained ‘in memory of the ancient 
manner of life.” Last, through diverse influences of ignorance and 
fear, came ‘the luxury of flesh and imported forms of diet*.’ 

The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already 
been noted, due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad 
of a flesh-eating Northern race whose splendid physical stature 

1 Porph. de Abst. 11.56. The treatise of Porphyry, so far as it relates to sacrifice, 
is mainly based on the previous treatise of Theophrastos. 

2 Eustath. ad Il. 1. 449 § 132. 

3 Porph. de Abst. m1. 20. 

4 Porph. loc. cit. wera dé Tovs ovAoXUTas ai Avoiae Kal H ev avdrats Kpewpayla. 


Ovore Kal meTa THY THY avayKaiwy Tpopav eiipeciy | THS KpewOatcias moduTéAELa Kal TO TIS 
Tpopys émeloaktov etipnrar. 


‘). ae a 
Harvest Festivals (CH. 





and strength Porphyry was little likely to appreciate. They were 
not wholly flesh-eaters; hence, as has been seen, they offered the 
sacrifice of the barley grains (ovAoxvraz), and offered these at a time 
when they were themselves eating some form of manufactured bread. 
The primitive character of the rite is, I think, marked by the ritual 
precedence. The ovrAoyvrax, the sprinkling of grains, has usually 
been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the heads of the 
victims, as the equivalent of the mola salsa of the Romans; but 
Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the sacrifice 
of Nestor’, he says, ‘the sprinkled grains are in memory of the food 
of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns.’ ‘ Hence,’ 
he adds, ‘one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled 
grains as barley-corns. That odAoxyvTar were nothing more nor 
less than the actual barley-corns is also shewn by a passage from 
Strato”. A cook, who apparently from his use of archaic termino- 
logy is according to his master more like a male sphinx than a 
cook, calls for ovAoyuTat: 


‘OvAoxvTac—why what on earth is that ?’ 


And the answer is 
‘Just barley-corns.’ 


_The first act in a Homeric sacrifice was uniformly prayer and 
the sprinkling of grain*, and it is important to observe that 
Eustathius‘ expressly notes this as a previous sacrifice (7poOupa) ; 
the ovAoxvTau were, he says, a mixture of grain and salt poured on 
the altar before the sacrificial ceremony began. By the ‘sacrificial 
ceremony’ Eustathius means the slaying of the animal victim. 
It is important to note that the grain was poured on the altar 
and was therefore in itself a sacrifice, as it is sometimes stated 
that it was merely thrown on the head of the victim. The state- 
ment of Eustathius is confirmed by the account in Euripides® 


? Kustath, ad Od. 11. 440, 1476. 37 as Kal of ovdAox’Tar Tis madads Tpophs 
dveuluynoxoy Ths Te Twv ovNGY, dep Eori THY KpOdv, 5d Kai Tods ovox’Tas TaY TIS 
Tahawy Kkplbas npurveuoev. 

2 Strato ap. Athen. rx. 29 § 382. 

® For a full discussion of o’dai and ovAoxUrae see Dr H. von Fritze, Hermes 1897, 

p. 236. 

* Eustath. ad Il. 1. 449 § 132, 23 elot 6& oddoxXUrat...7ad mpoPiuara...ol odhoxvrac 
ovAal joav Touréore KpiOal pera dav ds éwéxeov Tots Bwuois mpd THs iepoupyias. 

5 Hur, El. 804 

AaBwv Sé mpoxvras unrpds evvérns oéOev | 
Bare Bwmov’s, toidd’ évvérwy ern. 





ced Sprinkling of grain 87 


of the sacrifice made by Aegisthus to the Nymphs. Here, before 
the elaborate slaying of the bull, we have, just as in Homer, the 
sprinkling of the grain, and it 7s sprinkled on the altar. The 
Messenger tells Electra that when all was ready Aegisthus 
‘Took the grains for sprinkling and he cast them 
Upon the altar and these words he spake.’ 

The sprinkling of salted meal (mola salsa) was, if we may believe 
Athenaeus', a later innovation. He tells us distinctly, quoting 
Athenion as his authority, that the use of salt for seasoning was 
a comparatively late discovery and therefore excluded from certain 
sacrifices to the gods. 

‘Whence even now, remembering days of old, 
The entrails of their victims for the gods 
They roast with fire and bring no salt thereto, 
Because at first they knew no use for salt. 


And even when they knew and loved its savour 
They kept their fathers’ sacred written precepts.’ 


The sacrifice of the animal victim never in Homer takes place 
without the ‘previous sacrifice’ of grain-sprinkling and prayer, 
but prayer and grain-sprinkling can take place, as in the prayer 
of Penelope’, without the animal sacrifice. This looks as though the 
animal sacrifice were rather a supplementary later-added act than 
a necessary climax. Later, when animal sacrifice became common 
and even as a rule imperative, the real sacrificial intent of the 















preliminary grain-sprinkling would naturally become obscured and 
it would be brought into connection with animal sacrifice by the 
practice of sprinkling grain on the heads of the victims. 
By Plutarch’s*? time the sprinkling of grain was regarded as 
something of an archaeological curiosity. He asks in his Greek 
- Questions ‘ Who is he who is called among the Opuntians kritho- 
'. logos, i.e. the ‘barley collector’? The answer is ‘Most of the 
A Greeks. make use of barley for their very ancient sacrifices when 
the citizens offer first-fruits. And the man who regulates these 
sacrifices and gets in these first-fruits is called krithologos. He 
adds a curious detail illustrative of the two strata of worship, ‘and 
. they had two priests, one to supervise divine things, one for those 
of things demonic. In like archaic fashion, when Pisthetairos* 


’ 


1 Athen, xiv: 81 § 661. 2 Hom. Od. tv. 761. 
3 Plut. Q. Gr. vi. 4 Ar. Av. 622. 


88 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


would inaugurate the blessed simplicity of bird-rule, he revives 
the ancient ritual of the sprinkling of barley-corns: 


‘O better than worship of Zeus Most High 
Is the service of Birds that sing and fly. 
They ask for no carven temple’s state, 
They clamour not for a golden gate. 

The shrine they ask of a mortal’s vow 

Is leave to perch on an olive bough. 

In the little thickets of ash and oak 

They dwell anigh us. We humble folk 
Never need fare to the far-off lands 

Of Ammon or Delphi, but lift our hands 
Under our vine and our fig-tree’s shade. 
For a slender grace let our prayer be said, 
As we cast up our barley in little showers 
And a little grace from the Birds is ours.’ 


The barley grain sprinkled is part of the ritual of the Olympians, 
but in the case of the two survivals to be next considered, the 
pelanos and the nephalia, their use was almost wholly confined to, 
and characteristic of, the lower stratum of worship, that of ghosts 
and sprites and underworld divinities. 

After the sacrifice of the natural fruits of the earth, the 
mayKxapria, comes the most primitive form of artificial food, Le. 
the pelanos, a sort of porridge. 

We speak of Bread and Wine as sacramental elements, but 
both are far removed from being elemental. Leavened bread, the 
Greek dptos, isa product of advanced civilization, and with a true 
conservative ritual instinct the Roman Church prescribes to this 
day the use of the unleavened wafer. Athenaeus’, citing the author 
of a play called the Beggars, tells us that when the Athenians set 
a meal in the Prytaneum for the Dioscuri they serve upon the 
tables cheese and barley-porridge (fuvar7v) and chopped olives 
and leeks, making remembrance of their ancient mode of life. 
And Solon bids them supply to those who had free meals in the 
Prytaneum barley cake (uwafav), but at feasts to place in addition 
loaves of bread (dprov), and this in imitation of Homer. For 
Homer, when he brought the chiefs together to Agamemnon, says 
‘they stirred up meal.’ The words ‘they stirred up meal,’ dvpero 
’ dura, do not occur in our text, but the author of the Beggars 
clearly refers to the ordinary Homeric meal, and takes us straight 


1 Athen, rv. 14 § 137. 


at 


m1] The pelanos Es, 


‘back to the real primitive meaning of pelanos. On the shield of 



































Achilles! we have the picture of a harvest feast: 


‘The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak, 

The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk 

Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.’ 

The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have 
their supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast 
clearly understands the passage; he comments: madvvov, Euacoov 
7 €pupov, ‘they sprinkle, 1.e. they knead or mix together. It is 
noticeable that he employs the exact word, épuvpov, quoted by 
Athenaeus as in the text of Homer’. To explain the passage as 
‘sprinkle on the heads of the victims or on the roast flesh’ is to 
miss the whole antithesis between master and man. Eustathius’, 
that close observer of primitive fact, saw what was being done in 
Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his own days. He says 
‘to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but a sort 
of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.’ To any one who has 
watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from zradv- 
vew, to sprinkle, to dvpew and pacceww, to stir and to knead, is 
natural and necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, 
you then stir it, so far you have porridge; if you let it get thicker 
and thicker you must knead it and then you have oat-cake. It 
has of course frequently been noted that a pelanos may be either 
fluid or solid, and herein lies the explanation. When the pelanos 
is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it becomes a pemma, an 
ordinary cake. The Latin libum*, a cake, is a strict parallel; it 
was primarily a thing out-poured, a libation, then a solid thing 
cooked and eaten. 

A pelanos was then primarily the same as alphita, barley-meal. 


1 Hom. Il. xvitt. 560. 

2 The process of primitive bread-making is fully discussed by Prof. Benndorf 
(Eranos Vindobensis, p. 374), to whom I am indebted for the view here expressed. 
In Yorkshire within my own remembrance a rather repulsive mess of corn stewed 
in milk with currants was always eaten on Christmas Eve before the regular feast 
began. It was served as soup and called frummety. 

3 Eustath. ad Il. xvi. 563 7d 6é madivew ddquta ovd€ viv Sydot apromoiay ada 
ro émimacua ctynes dv Tots madaots, and again in discussing the feast of Eumaeus 
(§ 1751, 33) 6 & GAguta NevKd ewdduver, 6 éorw émémace Kata Bos apxaioy To toTepov 
apyncav. 

4 Varro L.L. v. 106 libum quod ut libaretur. The Latin puls and polenta are 


‘probably from the same root as 7é\avos. Pliny (N.H. xvi. 19) says it is clear that 


es and those on birthdays are carried on with pulse. 


‘ 


ancient days pulte non pune Romanos vixisse. He adds that to his day primitive 


90 Harvest Festivals (CH. 


The food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early 
specialized off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in 
which a pelanos, under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed 
eaten at all save by Earth and underworld gods, their repre- 
sentative snakes and other Spirits of Aversion’. The comic poet 
Sannyrion? puts it thus: 

‘We gods do call it pelanos, 

You pompous mortals barley-meal.’ 

To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods. 

As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men 
ate porridge cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine 
men drank a honey drink. And as the conservative gods, long 
after men ate fermented bread, were faithful to their porridge, so 
long after men drank wine they still offered to the gods who 
were there before the coming of the vine ‘wineless libations, 
nephaha®. 

The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical , 
with that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with 
this difference—ghosts are less conservative than fully developed 
gods; the habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those 
of the men who worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man 
offered to ghosts the wine he loved so well himself. 

Atossa‘ brings for the ghost of Darius a pelanos, as was meet. 
She brings also all manner of ‘soothing gifts’ (wesAueTy pia), but 
she pours wine also: 

‘A holy heifer’s milk, white, fair to drink, 

Bright honey drops from flowers bee-distilled, 
With draughts of water from a virgin fount, 

And from the ancient vine its mother wild 

An unmixed draught, this gladness; and fair fruit 


Of gleaming olive ever blossoming 
And woven flowers, children of mother earth.’ 


The dead fare as the living; wine is added to milk and honey 


1 Aesch. Pers. 204 dmorpémo.ot Saluoot, and 523 yy Te Kal POirots Swpjuara. 

2 Sannyr. frg. 1 Koch. 

% The sources for ynypddia are well collected and discussed by Dr von Fritze, De 
Libatione veterum Graecorum, Berlin 1893, also by Stengel, Hermes xx1t. p. 645, and 
‘Chthonische und Totenkult’ in Festschrift fiir Friedlinder, p. 418, and W. Barth, 
‘Bestattungsspende bei den Griechen,’ Neue Jahrbiicher fiir klass. Altertiim. 1900, 
p. 177. W. Barth draws distinctions between the cultus of the dead and that of 
chthonic divinities, which I think cannot be clearly made out. 

4 Aesch. Pers, 607. 





| Nephalia : - OT 


and olive oil and water, but wine perhaps significantly as an 
Innovation is never named, Atossa seems also consciously to 
insist over much on its being wild, primitive, ancient, and therefore 
permissible. We are reminded of the religious shifts to which the 
Romans were put by the introduction of wine into their daily life 
and thence into their ritual. Plutarch'in his Roman Questions says 
that ‘when the women poured libations of wine to Bona Dea, they 
called it by the name of milk, and Macrobius? adds ‘that wine 
could not be brought in under its own name, but the wine was 
called milk and the vessel containing it a honey-jar.’ 

The ghosts of the dead admit and even welcome the addition 
of wine, but actual chthonic divinities are stricter. When Oedipus? 
came to the precinct of the Semnae, the Chorus bid him make 
atonement, because, though unwittingly, he has violated the 
precinct. He asks the precise ritual to be observed. he answer, 
though it is thrice familiar, is sc important for the understanding 
of chthonic ceremonies that it must be given in full: 


‘Oed. And with what rites, O strangers? teach me this. 
Chor. First, fetch thou from an ever-flowing fount, 
Borne in clean hands, an holy drink-offering. 
Oed. And next, when I have brought the holy draught ? 
Chor. Bowls are there next, a cunning craftsman’s work, 
Crown thou their lips and handles at the brim. 
Oed. With branches, woollen webs, or in what wise ? 
Chor. Of the ewe-lamb take thou the fresh-shorn wool. 
Oed. So be it, and then to what last rite I pass? 
Chor. Pour thy drink offerings, facewards to the dawn. 
Oed. With these same vessels do I pour the draught ? 
Chor. Yes, in three streams, the last pour wholly out. 
Oed. And filled wherewith this last? teach me this also. 
Chor. Water and honey—bring no wine thereto. 
Oed. When the dark shadowed earth hath drunk of this? 
Chor. Lay on it thrice nine sprays of olive tree 
With both thine hands, and make thy prayer the while. 
Oed. That prayer? vouchsafe to teach, for mighty is it. 
Chor. Pray thou that, as they are called the Kindly Ones, 
With kindly hearts they may receive and bless. 
Be this thy prayer, thine own or his who prays 
For thee. Whisper thy prayer nor lift thy voice, 
Then go, look not behind, so all is well.’ 


' The Kindly Ones, though their name is only adjectival, have 


1 Plut. Q. R. xx. olvoy 8 airy omévdover yaa mpocayopevoveat. 

2 Macr. 1. 12. 25 quod vas in quo vinum inditum est mellarium nominetur et 
yvinum lac nuncupetur. 
® Soph. Oed. Col. 468. 


92 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


crystallized into divinities; they are no longer ghosts, and none 
may tamper with their archaic ritual. 

For the dread. counterpart of the Eumenides, the Erinyes, 
there is the same wineless service, witness the reproach of 
Clytaemnestra. The Erinyes have deserted her, yet she has given 
them of the ritual they exact’: 

‘Full oft forsooth from me have ye licked up 
Wineless libations, sober balms of wrath.’ 

To offer wine was the last outrage done by the parvenu 

Apollo to ancient ritual, hence the bitter protest*: 
‘Thou hast bewildered the old walks of life, 
With wine the Ancient Goddesses undone.’ 

/ The wineless service of the Eumenides in the Oedipus Coloneus 
is of course no mere invention of the poet. At Titane near Sicyon 
Pausanias* came to a grove of evergreen oaks and a temple of the 
goddesses whom, he says, the Athenians call Semnae, but the 
Sicyonians Eumenides, and every year on one day they celebrate 
a festival in their honour, ‘sacrificing sheep with young and a 
libation of water and honey.’ 

The scholiast in the Oedipus Coloneus* gives a list of the 
divinities to whom at Athens wineless sacrifices were made. 
He quotes as his authority Polemon. ‘The Athenians were 
careful in these matters and scrupulously pious (éovov) in the 
things that pertain to the gods, and they made wineless sacrifices 
to Mnemosyne the Muse, to Eos, to Helios, to Selene, to the 
Nymphs, to Aphrodite Ourania.’ The list is at first surprising. 
We associate nephalia with the Underworld powers, but here it is 
quite clear that, in primitive days, side by side with the Earth-gods 
were worshipped sky-gods, but in their own simple being as 
Dawn and Sun and Moon, not as full-blown human Olympians. 
Mnemosyne’, it will later be seen, had a well of living water herself; 
she needed no wine. The Heavenly Aphrodite is more surprising, 
but her honey libation is further attested by Empedokles*. He 


1 Aesch. Hum. 104. 2 Aesch. Hum. 727. 

3 P.1.11.3. The relation between the Semnae and the Eumenides and the ritual 
of the Semnae, which is identical with that of the Eumenides, wil! be diseussed 
later in Chapter v. 

4 Schol. ad Oed. Col. 100. 5 Porph. de antr. Nymph. 7. 

6 Emped. frg. ap. Porph. de Abst. 1, 21. 











| The fireless sacrifice 93 


tells of the days long ago when the god Ares was not, nor King 
Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon, but only 
‘Kypris the Queen 

Here they adored with pious images, 

With painted victims and with fragrant scents, 

With fume of frankincense and genuine myrrh. 

Honey of yellow bees upon the ground 

They for libation poured.’ 

But though here and there a very early ‘Heavenly One’ claimed 
the honey service, 1t was mostly the meed of the dead. Porphyry 
knew that honey was used to embalm the body of the dead because 
it prevented putrefaction, and this custom of honey burial is 
echoed in the myth of Glaukos and the honey-jar. The marvellous 
sweetness of honey lent itself to the notions of propitiation and 
placation—‘sweets to the sweet’ or rather, as it seemed to the 
practical primitive mind, ‘sweets to the spirits to be sweetened, 
the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased. 

One more element in archaic ritual yet remains to be con- 
sidered—the fireless sacrifice. 

Fire, it has been seen, was used in the Homeric burnt sacrifice 
for sublimation. By fire, Eustathius? says in speaking of the 
burning of the dead among the northern nations, ‘the divine 
element was borne on high as though in a chariot and mingled 
with the heavenly beings. In like fashion we may suppose the 
burnt victim was freed from the grosser elements and in purified 
vaporous form ascended to the gods of the upper air. This is 
what Porphyry* means when he says that in burnt sacrifice we 
‘immortalize the dues of the heavenly gods by means of fire.’ Fire 
again in the service of the underworld gods was used, it has 
further been seen, for utter destruction, for the holocaust. But 
in certain rituals established, it may be, before the discovery of 
fire, it was definitely prescribed that the sacrifice should be fireless. 
Diogenes Laertius‘ relates that according to tradition there was 
but one altar in Delos at which Pythagoras could worship, the 
‘Altar of Apollo the Sire, which stood behind the great Altar of 
the Horns, because on this altar wheat and barley and cakes are 


1 Some further points as to the Nephalia will be considered in relation 
to the Eleusinian ritual (p. 150), and the Orphic mysteries (Chapter x.). 
2 Bustath. ad Il. 1. 52. For a full discussion of the purport of cremation 
_see Prof. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece 1. p. 540. 
3 Porph. de Abst. 11. 5. 4 Diog. Laert. vir. 13. 


94 Harvest Festivals [cH. | 


the only offering laid and the sacrifice is without fire and there 
is no sacrificial victim—so Aristotle stated in his Constitution of 
the Delians. This altar was also known as the Altar of the Pious. 
The foundation of the great blood-stained Altar of the Horns may 
still be seen in Delos; the primitive Altar of the Sire has left no 
trace, but in some bygone time a voice, it would seem, had been 
heard on Mount Cynthus saying, ‘Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy 
in all my Holy Mountain.’ } 

What ancient worship of a ‘Sire’ Apollo had taken to himself 
in Delos we do not know, but in remote Arcadia a fireless sacrifice 
of a specially simple kind went on right down to the time of 
Pausanias' in honour of a home-grown goddess, Demeter. At 
Phigalia Pausanias visited the cave-sanctuary of the Black 
Demeter; indeed he says in his pious way it was chiefiy for her 
sake that he went to Phigalia, and he adds ‘I sacrificed no victim 
to the goddess, such being the custom of the people of the country. 
They bring instead as offerings the fruit of the vine and of other 
trees they cultivate, and honey-combs and wool which is still 
unwrought and full of the natural grease; these they lay on the 
altar which is set up in front of the cave, and having laid them 
there they pour on them olive oil. Such is the rite of sacrifice 
observed by private persons and once a year by the Phigalian 
people collectively. Everything here prescribed is in its most 
natural form, grapes rather than wine, honey-comb rather than 
honey, unwrought wool not artificial fillets, and the service is 
fireless. It was a service to content even Pythagoras. 

That there was between the early fireless sacrifice and the 
burnt sacrifice of the Olympian in some prehistoric time a rivalry 
and clashing of interests, is clear from the Rhodian tradition of 
the Heliadae. Pindar’ tells how: 

‘Up to the hill they came, 
Yet in their hand 

No seed of burning flame, 
And for the Rhodian land 


With fireless rite 
The grove upon the citadel they dight.’ 







And the scholiast commenting on the passage says: ‘The 
Rhodians going up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot 


\ 


a 


+ P.-vin. 42:15, 2 Pind. Ol. vit. 47, schol. ad loc. 


, 
‘ 


f 
* 





1m] The Pharmakos 95 


to take fire with them for their offerings (é€vayiopwacv) and made 
a fireless sacrifice. Hence it came about that, as the Athenians 
were the first to sacrifice by fire, Athene thought it best to live 
with them.’ Athene was always a prudent goddess, ready to swim 
with the tide; she was ‘all for the father,’ all for the Olympians, 
and she had her reward. Philostratos! tells the same story with 
something more of emphasis. He contrasts the Acropolis of 
Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes; the Rhodians had only 
a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour of 
burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke; the goddess went to live with 
them because ‘they were wiser in their generation (copwtépous) 
and good at sacrificing.’ From Diodorus*? we learn that it was 
Cecrops who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens. On Cecrops 
were fathered many of the innovations of civilized life, among 
them marriage. He was halfway between the old and the new, 
half civilized man, half snake. He, Pausanias® significantly tells 
us, was the first to give to Zeus the name of the Highest. He too 
became all for the Olympian. ° 

These forms of primitive sacrifice—the pelanos, the barley 
grains, the nephalia, the fireless rites—have been considered at 
some length because, though in part they went over to the 
Olympians, they remain broadly speaking and in their simplest 
forms characteristic of the lower stratum and of the worship of 
underworld spirits. Moreover it is these primitive rites which 
were, as will later be seen, taken up and mysticized by the religion 
of Orpheus. 

It remains to consider the second and by far the most im- 
portant element in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the 
ceremony of the Pharmakos. 


THE PHARMAKOS. 


That the leading out of the pharmakos was a part of the 
festival of the Thargelia we know from Harpocration*. He says 
in commenting on the word: ‘At Athens they led out two men 
to be purifications for the city; it was at the Thargelia, one was 


1 Philostrat. Hik. 1. 27 § 852. 2 Diod. v. 56. 
2 Fo yeu. 2. 2. 4 Harpocrat. s.v. papuakéds. 


96  _Harvest Festivals (CH. 


for the men and the other for the women.’ These men, these phar- 
makoi, whose function it was to purify the city, were, it will later 
be seen, in all probability put to death, but the expression used 
by Harpocration is noteworthy—they were led out. The gist of 
the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it occurs, is 
incidental. 

The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically 
certain, on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be 
forgotten, for it was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius’ 
says in his life of Socrates: ‘He was born on the 6th day of 
Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city. The 
pharmakos is not expressly named, but it will be seen in the 
sequel that the cleansing of the city by the expulsion of the 
pharmakos was regarded as the typical purification of the whole 
year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when 
the nature of the rites has been examined’. 

The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, 
but I think frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. — It 
appears at first sight to involve what we in our modern termino- 
logy call ‘Human Sacrifice. To be told that this went on in 
civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.c. shocks our preconceived 
notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely to do 
or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the 
difficulty in one of two ways: either we try to relegate the 
ceremony of the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, 
or we so modify and mollify its main issues as to make it un- 
meaning. 

The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. 
We have to determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, 
and next, did that ceremonial last on into historic times? 

My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence 
that it did last on into the 5th century B.c., but that, if the gist 
of the ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori 
difficulty about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty 
being removed, we shall accept an overwhelming probability. 
The evidence for the historical pharmakos is just as good as 

1 Diog. Laert. 1. 4. 

2 Classical sources for the pharmakos are most fully enumerated by Mannherdt, 


Myth. Forschungen, pp. 123, 133. For primitive analogies see Frazer, Golden Bough, 
2nd ed., vol. m1. p. 93, from whom I have taken the instances adduced. 





— oe 
y 1 | The Pharmakos 97 


eg. the evidence for the chewing of the buckthorn at the 
Anthesteria. 

It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the 
human scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible 
notion, was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic 
literature practically proverbial. Aristophanes! wants to point 
the contrast between the old mint of sterling state officials 
and the new democratic coinage: he says, now-a-days we fill 
offices by 


‘Any chance man that we come across, 
Not fit in old days for a pharmakos, 
These we use 

And these we choose, 

The veriest scum, the mere refuse,’ 


and again in a fragment’: 
‘Your kinsman! how and whence, you pharmakos,’ 
and in the Knights? Demos says to Agoracritos : 


‘T bid you take the seat 
In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos 
Was wont to sit.’ 


Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ‘ offscouring’ (ka@apya), 
a current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt. 

- Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias* in 
his speech against Andokides is explicit: ‘We needs must hold 
that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we 
purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly 
expel a pharmakos and rid ourselves of a criminal; for of this 


sort the fellow is.’ 
For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted 
‘to a very late author. Tzetzes? (A.D. 1150) in his Thousand 


- 1 Ar. Ran. 734. 2) Ar, frg. 532. Se Ar. Eq. 1405. 

4 Lys. c. Andok. 108. 4: viv oty xpy vopifev TLLW@poULEvous kal dmaharropevous 
*Avdoxldov thy modu kadaipery Kal dmodromopmetobat kal papuwakoyv aomeurew 
kal dAurnpiov amaddarrecOa, ws ev TovTwy obTds EaTL. 

5 Fragments of Hipponax (6th cent. B.c.) incorporated by Tzetzes Hist, 23. 
726—756 : 2 

Ti ro xadapya; 

6 dapuakds TO KdOapya ToolToy Av TO Waat. 

av {cunpopa caréhape woh Beounvia, 

cir’ obv Amos etre Notmos elre Kal Ba Bos aio, 

TOV TaVTwY dwopporepov yo ws mpos Ouclav 

eis kabapyov Kai papuakoy modews TIS vooovons. 
w eis Témov 6€ TOV m poo popov oTynoayTes THY Guoliay 

Tupov Te dovTes 7h xXetpl Kai pagav kal ioxadas, 

émTdkis yap pamicavres éxeivov els TO Teos 





— oe + 


98 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


Histories describes it as follows: ‘The pharmakos was a purifi- 
cation of this sort of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the 
wrath of God, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other 
mischief, they led forth as though to a sacrifice the most 
unsightly of them all as a purification and a remedy to the 
suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed place, and 
gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs, and 
seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other 
wild plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of 
wild trees and scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, 
for a purification, as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, 
I think, Lycophron records it of the Locrian maidens, speaking 
somewhat after this manner, I do not remember the exact verse, 
“when, having consumed their limbs with fuel from fruitless trees, 
the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of the maidens that 
died on the hill of Traron.”’ 

Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward 
confused way he goes on to tell us his souree—the iambic poet 
Hipponax. ‘And Hipponax gives us the best complete account 
of the custom when he says, ‘to purify the city and strike (the 
pharmakos) with branches’; and in another place he says in his 
first iambic poem, ‘striking him in the meadow and beating him. 
with branches and with leeks like a pharmakos’; and again in other 
places he says as follows: ‘we must make of him a pharmakos’ ; 
and he says, ‘offering him figs and a barley cake and cheese such as 
pharmakot eat’; and ‘they have long been waiting agape for them, 
holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do’; and some- 

oxi\Xats, cuKats dyplas te Kal ddAols THY ayplov, 
TéNos mwupl Katréxatov év Evots Tots ayplots, 


Kal Tov omodov els Od\acocav Eppawov kal avéuwous 
kai kabapuov Tis moews ws Epyv THs vooovens. 


6 6¢ ‘ImmaGvak dpicra churav ro eos éyer 
1 wow Kabalperv kal Kpddnor BadrrecOar (papuaxdr), 
kal add\axov dé mov dyot mpdrw lauBw ypdgdwv 
2 BdadXovres év Netwwve kal pawlfovres 
Kpaddnor kal oxi\dX\now wWorep Papmakdr. 
Kal maw addAos Toros O€ TadTa Pyot kar’ Eros 


3 det 5 atvrov és dapmakdy éExroinoacbat. 
4 kaon wapétery laxddas Te kal wafay 
kal Tupdv olov écOloveot pappaxol. 
5 waat yap avrovs mpocdéxovra(t) xdoKovres 


Kpddas €xovres ws Exovot pappaxol. 
Kal dddNaxod Oé ro’ pnow év 7G alte lauBw 
6 Atu@ yévynrac Enpds ws év TO Ovuw 
papmakds axdels Emrdkis pariobeln. 








ur] The Pharmakos 99 


where else he says in the same iambic poem, ‘may he be parched 
with hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos 
and beaten seven times. 

Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from 
Hipponax, and the words of Hipponax correspond so closely in 
every detail with his own account that we are justified in sup- 
posing that his account of the end of the ceremonial, the burning 
and scattering of the ashes, is also borrowed; but the evidence of 
this from Hipponax he omits. 

Hipponax makes his statements apparently, not from any 
abstract interest in ritual, but as part of an insult levelled at his 
enemy Boupalos. This is made almost certain by another frag- 
ment of Hipponax? in which he says, ‘as they uttered impreca- 
tions against that abomination (ayos) Boupalos.’ The fragments 
belong obviously to one or more iambic poems in which Hipponax 
expresses the hope that Boupalos will share the fate of a phar- 
makos, will be insulted, beaten, driven out of the city, and at last 
presumably put to death. Hipponax is not describing an actual 
historical ceremony, but to make his insults have any point he 
must have been alluding to aritual that was, in the 6th century B.c., 
perfectly familiar to his hearers. 

Some of the statements of Hipponax as to the details of the 
ritual are confirmed from other sources, and are given in these 
with certain slight variations which seem to show that Hipponax 
was not the only source of information. 

Helladius? the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that ‘it was 
the custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with 
a view to purification ; one for the men, one for the women. The 
pharmakos of the men had black figs round his neck, the other 
had white ones, and he says they were called cuBaxyou. Helladius 
added that ‘this purification was of the nature of an apotropaic 
ceremony to avert diseases, and that it took its rise from An- 
drogeés the Cretan, when at Athens the Athenians suffered 
abnormally from a pestilential disease, and the custom obtained 
of constantly purifying the city by pharmakoi,’ 

The man and woman and the black and white figs are variant 
details. Helladius is our sole authority for the curious name 


1 Hippon. frg. 11 (4) ws of wey ayet Bourddw KarnpavTo. 
? Hellad. ap. Phot. Bibl. c. 279, p. 534. 


bo 





100 Harvest Festivals 





cuBaxyou: what this means is not certain. The term may have 
meant ‘pig-Bacchoi. The Bacchoi, as will later be seen, were 
sacred and specially purified persons with magical powers, and 
the term may have been applied to mark analogous functions. 
Crete was the home of ceremonies of purification. 

Harpocration, in the passage already quoted, confirms the 
view that there were two pharmakoi, but he says they were both 
men: one for the women, one for the men. The discrepancy is 
not serious. It would be quite easy if necessary to dress up 
a man as a woman, and even a string of white figs would be 
sufficient presentment of gender; simulata pro veris is a principle 
of wide acceptation in primitive ritual. 

The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal im- 
portance. It was a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of 
the flute. Hesychius! says, ‘The song of the branches is a 
measure that they play on the flute when the pharmakoi are 
expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig sprigs. The 
pharmakos. was actually called “he of the branches.”’ It must 
have been a matter of very early observation that beating is 
expulsive. You beat a bush, a bird escapes; you beat a garment, 
the dust comes out; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will 
surely emerge. We associate beating with moral stimulus, but 
the first notion is clearly expulsive. 

Probably some notion of the application or instigation of 
good as well as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be 
conjectured from the fact that rods made of special plants and 
trees were used, notably leeks and fig-trees. Plants with strong 
smells, and plants the eating of aus is purgative, are naturally 
regarded as ‘good medicine’; as expulsive of evil, and hence in 
a secondary way as promotive of good. 

Pythagoras? taught that to have a leek hung up over a door- 
way was a good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and 
Dioscorides* records the same belief. Lucian* makes Menippus 
relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead 
he was ‘purged and wiped clean and consecrated with leek and 
torches.’ 


1 Hesych. s.v. kpadlns vdsos. 2 Plin. NN. He sxoueo: 
8 Diose. de mat. med. 11. 202. 
4 Luc. Nek. 7 éxadnpé re me xal dréuate kal mepujyrice Sadliots Kal exi\dp. 


, 
yy 





The Pharmakos 101 





cigs i 
% ‘The locus classicus on beating with leek is of course the 

4 acrid of the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus! 
makes Simichidas sing : 

‘Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be 

Then never shall the boys of Arcady 

Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting 

When scanty meat is left for offering ; 

If not, thy skin with nails be flayed and torn 

And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.’ 
And the scholiast remarks, ‘they say that a festival was held in 
Arcadia in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the 
officials sacrificed a small victim, and there was not enough to eat 
for the worshipper; or the Arcadians when they went out hunting 
if they had good sport paid honour to Pan; if the reverse they 
maltreated him with leeks because, being a mountain god, he had 
power over the produce of the chase. The first explanation 
confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right. Pan 
is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his 
business. 

It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi 
beaten, in order to ‘stimulate their powers of fertility.’ In a sense 
this is ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and 
misleading emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten 
partly to drive out evil influences, partly, it should not be for- 
gotten, to relieve the feelings of the beaters. . When ie te 
influences are beaten out, the god will undoubtedly do Detter 
next time, but it is only in this sense that the powers of fertility 
are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance. He is © 
utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more 
good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is 
doomed to death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already 
discussed (p. 51), the women are struck by the februwm as a 
fertility charm, but even here the primary notion must have been 
the expulsion of evil influences. 

The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial, Aristo- 
phanes? makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed 
Xanthias, and the real Xanthias makes answer : 


‘Oh, in the usual way, but when you beat him 
Don’t do it with a leck or a young onion.’ 


1 Theoer. Id. v1. 104, schol. ad loc. . 2 Ar. Ran. 620. 





102 Harvest Festivals es 
; - 
Here undoubtedly the meaning is, ‘don’t let this be a ee 
ceremonial beating, a religious performance,’ and the allusion — 
gains in point by the fact that the supposed slave was a real god 
to be treated worse than a pharmakos. Lucian! says that the 
Muses, he is sure, would never deign to come near his vulgar book- 
buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of myrtle they will beat 
him with myrrh and mallow and get rid of him, so that he may 
not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar book- 

buyer is a pharmakos. 

We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was 
beaten ; was he also put to death? Tzetzes, as has been seen, 
states that he was burnt with the wood of certain fruitless trees, 
and that his ashes were scattered to the sea and the winds. 
The scholiast on Aristophanes? also states expressly that by 
dnuoowol, i.e. people fed and kept at the public expense, was 
meant ‘those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi 
purified cities by their slaughter.’ So far his statement,is of the 
most general character, and it need not have been inferred that 
he was speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ‘for the Athenians 
maintained certain very ignoble and useless persons, and on the 
occasion of any calamity befalling the city, I mean a pestilence or 
anything of that sort, they sacrificed these persons with a view to 
purification from pollution and they called them purifications’ 
(xaBappata). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was excessively ungainly 
(apopdortepov), the scholiast, worthless and useless. Aristophanes 
himself regarded them as the ‘scum’ of humanity. 

The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, 
and did the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and 
on Tzetzes alone, we might be inclined to question it. A better | 
authority is preserved for us by Harpocration*®; he says, ‘Istros 
(circ. B.C. 230), in the first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says 
that Pharmakos is a proper name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred 
phialae belonging to Apollo, and was taken and stoned by the 
men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at the Thargelia are 
mimetic representations of these things.’ The aetiology of Istros 


—S 


1 Lue, Indoct. 1, 2 Schol, ad Ar. Hq. 1136, 

% Harpocrat. s.v. gapuaxds* dre 6é dvoua Kipidv éorww 6 dapuaxds, iepas 5¢ Piddas 
Tov ’Amé\\wvos KNéWas Kai adovs bwrd Tov mepl Tov ’AyiAdéa KaTe\e’aOn, Kai Ta Tots 
Oapynrlos aydueva roirwy dmrommnuard éorw, “lorpos év mpwrw tay *Amd\\wvos 
éripaverav elpnKer. 


TY | The Pharmakos 103 


is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the 
eeremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to 
cleath. 

That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human phar- 
makos was actually put to death scarcely admits of doubt: that 
Istros believed this took place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in 
honour of Apollo may be inferred from his aetiology. There still 
remains in the minds of some a feeling that the Athens of the 
fifth century was too civilized a place to have suffered the 
actual death of human victims, and that periodically, as part of 
a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was indi- 
cated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the 
ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a @uc/a, 
a burnt sacrifice ; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern 
sense at all, though, as will later be shown, it was one of the 
diverse notions that went to the making of the ancient idea of 
sacrifice. 

The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering 
made to uppease an angry god. It came to be associated with 
Apollo when he took over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not 
intended to please or to appease any spirit or god. It was, as 
ancient authors repeatedly insist, a ca@appos, a purification. The 
essence of the ritual was not atonement, for there was no one to 
atone, but riddance, the artificial making of an dyos, a pollution, 
to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign to our scientific 
habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was that evil of all 
kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and trans- 
ferred; it was highly catching. Next, some logical savage saw 
that the notion could be utilized for artificial riddance. The 
Dyaks! sweep misfortunes out of their houses and put them into 
a toy-house made of bamboo; this they set adrift on a river. On 
the occasion of a recent outbreak of influenza in Pithuria ‘a man had 
a small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scape- 
goats which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at some 
distance where they were let loose. From that hour the disease 
completely ceased in the town. The goats never returned; had 
they done so the disease must have come back with them.’ It 


1 For these modern savage analogies and many others see Dr Frazer, Golden 
Bough, 2nd ed., vol. 111. p. 93. 


tt 


_ 194 Harvest Festivals [cn 


be! Bn 


is needless for our purpose to accumulate instances of the count- 
less varieties of scape-goats, carts, cocks, boats, that the ingenuity 
of primitive man has invented. The instance chosen shows as 
clearly as possible that, as the gist of the ceremony is magical 
riddance, it is essential that the scape-goat, whatever form he 
takes, should never return. 

- This necessity for utter destruction comes out very clearly in 
an account of the way the Egyptians treated their scape-goats. 
Plutarch! in his discourse on Isis and Osiris says, on the authority 
of Manetho, that in the dog-days they used to burn men alive 
whom they called Typhonians, and their ashes they made away 
with by winnowing and scattering them. The winnowing-fan in 
which the corn was tossed and by means of which the chaff was 
blown utterly away was to Clement of Alexandria® the symbol of 
utter ruin and destruction. In his protest against the ruinous 
force of convention among pagan people, he says finely: ‘let us 
fly from convention, it strangles men, it turns them away from 
truth, it leads them afar from life; convention is a noose, a place 
of execution, a pit, a winnowing-fan; convention is ruin.’ 

~The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a 
vicarious sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that 
his life is a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom 
his lot would necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, 
an incarnate pollution; the educated who believe no such nonsense 
know that the kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is 
worse than death. Moreover nearly every civilized state to this 
day offers ‘human sacrifice’ in the shape of the criminals it executes. 
Why not combine religious tradition with a supposed judicial 
necessity? Civilized Athens had its barathron; why should 
civilized Athens shrink from annually utilizing two vicious and 
already condemned criminals to ‘ purify the city’? 

The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to 
death in civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly 
subordinate one. It has only been discussed in detail because the 
answer that we return to it depends in great measure on how 

‘ Plut. de Is. et Os, LXxu1. (Gvras dvOpwrous Karemiumpacay ws Mavedus lordpnKe 
Tudwvrious kadobvres kal rhv réppav abrav Aikuwyres Hpavivov Kal diéorecpor. 

2 Clem. Al. Protr. x11. 118 piywuer oby Thy cuv}Oecav.,.dyxet Tov dvOpwrov, Tis 


adnOelas drrorpérer, dmaye THs Cwhs, mayis €or Bapadpdy éorw Bddpos écri Nixvov éoriv, 
KaKkov 7) cuvHOea. 





| The Pharmakos 105 


far we realize the primary gist of a pharmakos, Le. the two notions 
of (a) the physicalness, the actuality of evil, and (b) the possibility 
of contagion and transfer. 

Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to 
be unduly influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape- 
goat. We remember how 


‘The scape-goat stood all skin and bone 

While moral business, not his own, 
Was bound about his head,’ 
And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents 
us from realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more 
primitive physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in 
this moralized Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a 
sacrifice proper; its sending away was preceded by sacrifice. The 
priest ‘made an atonement for the children of Israel for all their 
sins once a year, and when the sacrifice of bullock and goat and 
the burning of incense, and the sprinkling of blood was over, then 
and not till then the lve goat was presented to the Lord’. The 
Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that the burden laid upon 
the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence or famine, but 
rather the burden of moral guilt. ‘And Aaron shall lay both his 
hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the 
iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in 
all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall 
send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And 
the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a Jand not 
inhabited.’ 

But so close is the connection of moral and physical that 
even here, where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, 
there is evident danger of infection; the goat is sent forth into 
a land not inhabited and it would be manifestly undesirable that 
he should return. At Athens we hear of no confession of sins, it 
is famine and pestilence from which a terror-stricken city seeks 
riddance. 

This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out 
in a ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch* him- 
self, when he was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has 


1 Ley. xvi. 21, and for the Egyptian scape-animal see Herod. 11. 39. 
2 Plut. Q. Symp. vt. 8. 


106 Harvest Festivals ih [CH. 


left us the account. A household slave was taken and ceremonially 
beaten with rods of agnus castus—again a plan’ of cathartic 
quality—and driven.out of doors to the words, ‘Out with hunger, in 
with wealth and health.’ The ceremony was called the ‘expulsion 
of hunger,’ and Plutarch speaks of it as an ‘ancestral sacrifice.’ It 
was performed by each householder for his own house, and by the 
archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch was 
archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name 
of the ‘ceremony’ is instructive, 1t is é£eAaows, riddance, ex- 
pulsion, not as the pharmakos was, ca@appos, purification ; both 
are called @vaias, sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage 
when every religious ceremony is regarded as of the nature 
of burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of the pharmakos was taken on 
by Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ‘expulsion’ there is no pretence 
that any god is worshipped; the performance remains frankly 
magical. 

At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At 
Delphi a pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in 
which the victim was merely a puppet. 

In his 12th Greek Question Plutarch asks, ‘What is Charila 
among the Delphians?’ His answer is as follows: ‘Concerning 
Charila they tell a story something on this wise. The Delphians 
were afflicted by a famine following after a drought. They came 
to the gates of the king’s palace with their children and their 
wives to make supplication. And the king distributed grain and 
pulse to the noblest of them as there was not enough for all. 
And there came a little girl who had lost both her father and 
mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his 
shoe and threw the shoe into her face. Now she was poor and 
desolate but of noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her 
girdle and hanged herself. As the famine went on and pestilence 
was added thereto, the Pythia gave an oracle to the king that he 
must appease Charila, a maiden who had died by her own hand. 
After some difficulty they found out that this was the name of 
the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice 
which had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they 
still perform every nine years.’ 

The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account 
for certain features in an established ritual. The expression 


: 


' 
1 


TI | Charila 107 


Plutarch uses, a ‘sacrifice with admixture of purification’ (wewoy- 
pevnv Twa KaSapyod Ovaiar), is interesting because it shows that 
though by his time almost every religious ceremony was called 
a @voia, his mind is haunted by the feeling that the Charila 
ceremony was in reality a purification, a cafapuos; he would have 
been nearer the truth had he said it was a ‘purification containing 
in ita certain element of sacrifice.’ 

He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ‘The king is 
seated to preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes 
it to all, both citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image 
of Charila as a little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the 
king strikes the image with his shoe and the leader of the 
Thyiades takes the image and conducts it to a certain cavernous 
place, and there fastening (a rope) round the neck of the image 
they bury it where they buried the strangled Charila,’ 

The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the 
Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing. the ceremony of the 
Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe: leather 
is to this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern 
surrogate is of white satin. On a curious vase in the National 
Museum at Athens’, we have a representation of a wedding 
procession at which a man is in the act of throwing a shoe. It is 
still to-day regarded as desirable that bride and bridegroom 
should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled, and the shower 
of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The effigy of 
Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of 
destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the 
time when the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are 
women. 

A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at 
Marseilles adds some further instructive details. Servius, in com- 
menting on the words auri sacra fames? ‘accursed hunger of gold,’ 
notes that sacer may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, 
rather vaguely, to realize that between these two meanings is the 


1 My attention was kindly drawn to this vase by M. Perdrizet who proposes 
shortly to publish it. Suidas (s.v. e/S/wXov) seems to refer to the Charila ceremony, 
kedevet 7 ILvOia edwrdv Te memAaTHEVov eis BW yuvatkds meTéwpov eLapTay Kal aveppwobn 
7 més. For this and the oscilla ceremonies and the analogy of Artemis arayxouévn 
(P. vit. 23. 7) see Lobeck, Aglaoph. p. 175. The beating of the female slave in the 
temple of Leucothea (Plut. Q. R. xvi.) seems to have been based on a racial taboo, 
but a @apyaxds ceremony may underlie it. 

2 Serv. ad Verg. Aen. 11. 75. 


108 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


middle term ‘devoted.’ The use of the term, he says, is derived 
from a custom among the Gauls: ‘Whenever the inhabitants of — 
Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers 
himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure 
foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred 
boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the 
whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon 
him may fall all the ils of the whole city, and thus he is cast 
headlong down.’ 

Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of 
impurity is purified. To our modern minds pure and impure 
stand at two opposite poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat 
we certainly should not trouble about his preliminary purification. 
But the ancients, as Servius dimly feels, knew of a condition that 
combined the two, the condition that the savage describes as 
‘taboo. For this condition the Latins used the word ‘ sacer,’ the 
Greeks, as has already been seen, the word a@yos. It is in such 
complex primitive notions as those of sacer and dyos, that our 
modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to 
miss the full and complex significance. 


The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical 
ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice 
to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony 
of physical expulsion. It is satisfactory to find that the etymology? 
of the word confirms this view, Papwaxos means simply ‘magic- 
nian.’ Its Lithuanian cognate is burin, magic ; in Latin it appears 
as forma, formula, magical spell; our formulary retains some 
vestige of its primitive connotation. C@apwaxov in Greek means 
healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for better for worse, are 
magical. To express its meaning we need what our language has 
lost, a double-edged word like the savage ‘medicine. The phar- 
makos of the Thargelia shows us a state of things in which man 
does not either tend or avert god® or ghost, but seeks, by the 

1 For a full and very interesting discussion of the etymology and meaning 
of gapuaxés, see Osthoff, ‘Allerhand Zauber etymologisch beleuchtet,’ Bezzenberger, 
Beitrage xxiv. p. 109. As to the accentuation of the word ¢apuaxéds Eustathius 
(1935. 15) notes that it was proparoxytone ‘among the Ionians.’ 

2 As to the god worshipped at the Thargelia it is probable that when godhead 
came to be formulated Demeter Chloe long preceded Apollo. Diogenes Laertius 
(11. 44) notes that on the sixth day of Thargelia when the Athenians purified the 


city, sacrifice was done to Demeter Chloe. Here as elsewhere Apollo took over the 
worship of an Earth-goddess. : 


m1] Human Sacrifice 109 


‘medicine’ he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring 
or rather Whitsuntide ‘thorough cleaning.’ The ceremony of the 
pharmakos went in some sense to the making of the Greek and 
modern notion of sacrifice, but the word itself has other and 
perhaps more primitive connotations. 

Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the 
pharmakos, calls it a sacrifice (@vc/a), but we need not imitate 
him in his confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the 
Thargelia was a rite of expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, 
as it were, involved loss of life toa human being. The result is, 
indeed, in both cases the same to the human being, but the two 
ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance express widely different 
conditions and sentiments in the mind of the worshipper. 

_It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain 
evidence of ‘human sacrifice’ in our sense among the Greeks even 
of mythological days. A large number of cases which were by the 
tragedians regarded as such, resolve themselves into cases of the 
blood feud, cases such as those of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when 
the object was really the placation of a ghost, not the service of 
an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger number are-primarily not 
sacrifices, @vciat, but ceremonies of riddance and purification, 
KxaBappoi. The ultimate fact that lies behind such ceremonies is 
the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real 
meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented 
and some offended Olympian is introduced. 

The case of the supposed ‘human sacrifice’ of Athamas is 
instructive, both as to its original content and as to the shifting 
sentiments with which it was regarded. When Xerxes came to 
Alos in Achaia his guides, Herodotus’ tells us, anxious to give 
him all possible information as to local curiosities, told him the 
tradition about the sanctuary of Zeus Laphystios: ‘The eldest of 
the race of Athamas is forbidden to enter the Prytaneion which is 
called by the Achaians the Leiton. If he enters he can only go 
out to be sacrificed.’ It was further told how some, fearing this 
fate, had fled the country, and coming back and entering the 
Prytaneion were decked with fillets and led out in procession to be 


1 Herod. vit. 197. My attention was drawn to this passage and its importance 
as reflecting the attitude of the Greek mind towards Human Sacritices by 
Dr A. W. Verrall. 


110 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


sacrificed (a> Ovetai te €Enyéovto otéupace Tas TuKacOels Kal ws 
avy toumn é€aybels). Here there is obvious confusion, as the 
man who left the country to avoid death would never have been 
so foolish as, immediately on his return, to enter the forbidden 
place. The point is clear: great stress is laid on the leading 


forth in procession—the descendant of the royal race was a scape- 


Pa 


goat. Herodotus makes this quite clear. ( Athamas was sacrificed 
because the Achaeans were making a purification of the land 
(xaGappov Ths yopns Tovevpévov 'Ayatov). Herodotus gives as 
the cause of this primitive and perfectly intelligible custom 
various conflicting reasons which well reflect the various stages of 
opinion through which the thinking Greek passed. We have first 
the real reason—Athamas as a scape-goat-7 Then the public 
conscience is uneasy, and we have a legend that the ‘sacrifice’ is 
interrupted at the moment of consummation either by Herakles 
(according to Sophocles in the lost Athamas) or by Kytissoros. It 
is wrong to sacrifice; hence the sacrifice is interrupted, but it is 
wrong to interrupt sacrifice, so the descendants of Kytissoros are 
punished. ‘Then, finally, it is felt that the sacrifice must go on, 
but it is a dreadful thing, an ayos, so a chance of escape is given 
to the victim. Finally in the same complex legend we have the 
substitution of a ram for the human victim Phrixos. 

Sometimes incidentally we learn that other peoples adopted 
the device which may have satisfied the Athenians, i.e. needing a 
pharmakos they utilized a man already condemned by the state. 
Thus in the long list of ‘human sacrifices’ drawn up by Porphyry! in 
his indictment of human ignorance and fear he mentions that on 
the 6th day of the month Metageitnion a man was sacrificed to 
Kronos, a custom, he says, which was maintained for a long time 
unchanged. A man who had been publicly condemned to death 
was kept till the time of the festival of Kronia. When the 
festival came they brought him outside the gates before the 
image (€dous) of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink and slew him. 
The victim is already doomed, and it would seem intoxicated 
before he is sacrificed. ) 

In noting the substitution of animal for human sacrifice, one 
curious point remains to be observed. The step seems to us 
momentous because to us human life is sacrosanct. But to the 

1 Porphyr. de Abst. 11. 53—56. 


1 | The Bouphonia 111 


primitive mind the gulf between animal and human is not so wide. 
The larger animals, and certain animals which for various reasons 
were specially venerated, were in early days also regarded as sacro- 
sanct, and to slay them was murder, to be atoned for by 
purification. 

This notion comes out very clearly in the ritual of the Murder 
of the Ox, the Bouphonia’, or, as it was sometimes called, the 
Dipolia*. The Bouphonia by the time of Aristophanes* was a 
symbol of what was archaic and obsolete. After the Just Logos 
in the Clouds has described the austere old educational régime of 
ancient Athens, the Unjust Logos remarks : 


‘Bless me, that’s quite the ancient lot Dipolia-like, chock-full 
Of crickets and Bouphonia too.’ 


And the scholiast comments, ‘ Dipolia, a festival at Athens, in 
which they sacrifice to Zeus Polieus, on the 14th day of Skiro- 
phorion. It is a mimetic representation of what happened about 


the cakes (7éAavor) and the cows*’ What happened was this: 


‘Barley mixed with wheat, or cakes made of them, was laid upon 
the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus, on the Acropolis. Oxen were 
driven round the altar, and the ox which went up to the altar and 
ate the offerimg on it was sacrificed. The axe and knife with 
which the beast was slain had been previously wetted with water, 
brought by maidens called “ water-carriers.” The weapons were 
then sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of whom felled 
the ox with the axe and another cut its throat with the knife. As 


1 My account of the Bouphonia is taken from Dr Frazer’s summary, which is 
exactly based on the complex double account given by Porphyry from Theophrastos 
(Porphyr. de Abst. 11. 29 seq.) and Aelian (V.H. vit. 3). With Dr Frazer’s 
exhaustive commentary (Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. 11. p. 295) I am in substantial 
agreement, save that I do not see in the murdered ox the representative of the Corn 
Spirit. The Bouphonia as ox-murder was first correctly explained by Prof. 
Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 286 ff.). I have discussed it previously 
in Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, p. 424 ff.: see also Dr Paul Stengel, 
Rhein. Mus. 1897, p. 187. With Dr von Prott’s view (Rhein. Mus. 1897, p. 187) 
that the sense of guilt in the sacrifice arises from the fact that the ox was the 
surrogate of a human victim I wholly disagree. 

2 It is possible that Dipolia is etymologically not festival of Zeus Polieus but 
festival of the Plough Curse, see p. 23. 

3 Ar. Nub. 984. 

4 The scholiast is (so far as I know) the only authority who gives the female 
form. It is possible that the sacrifice may have been primarily to an earth-goddess 
and hence the animals arefemale. The curious ceremonial of the Chthonia (P. 11. 35. 3) 
was a similar butchery of cows in honour of Chthonia and presided over by old 
women who did the actual slaughter, and no man native or foreigner was allowed 
to see it. 


112 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


soon as he had felled the ox, the former threw the axe from him 
and fled, and the man who had cut the beast’s throat apparently 
imitated his example. Meantime the ox was skinned and all 
present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with 
straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set on its 
feet and yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then 
took place in an ancient law court, presided over by the king (as 
he was called), to determine who had murdered the ox. The 
maidens who had brought the water accused the men who had 
sharpened the axe and knife, the men who had sharpened the axe 
and knife blamed the men who had handed these implements to 
the butchers, the men who had handed the implements to the 
butchers blamed the butchers and the butchers blamed the axe 
and knife, which were accordingly found guilty and condemned 
and cast into the sea.’ 

The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a 
mummery so absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built 
hocus-pocus, should be regularly carried on in the centre of 
civilized Athens was enough to make the most careless and the 
most conventional reflect on the nature and strength of religious 
conservatism. But the rite was once of real and solemn import, 
and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service of Aversion. 
The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast of 
flesh meat, but it was a dreadful adyos, an abomination, to kill it, as 
bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox 
and the spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked 
or appeased. So great is the terror that no one device is enough. 
You pretend that the ox is not really dead, or at least that he has 
come to life: if that is not enough you pretend that he was him- 
self an offender: he ate the sacred cakes, not by compulsion, but of 
his own free, wicked will. Last you pretend that you did not do 
it yourself, it was some one else. No, not some one else, but some- 
thing else. Finally that thing is got rid of; the dyos, the 
pollution, is thrown into the sea. 

The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no 
surrogate for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. 
His murdered ghost, or at least the pollution of his murder, cries’ 
for placation and purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you 
had to be purified yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a 


111 | The Stepterion 113 


bronze ox, had to be purified for murdering you. Pausanias? was told 
the following story about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by 
the Corcyreans. <A little boy was sitting playing under the ox, 
and suddenly he lifted up his head and broke it against the 
bronze, and a few days after he died of the wounds. The Eleans 
consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out of the 
Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always con- 
servative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ‘that they 
were to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were 
customary among the Greeks in the case of involuntary homicide.’ 

To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing 
must be done, and yet that its doing involves an dyos, a pollution, 
comes out in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist 
of them is very clear in the account given by Diodorus? of the cere- 
monies of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ‘the man 
called He-who-slits-asunder (7apacyiorns) takes an Aethiopian 
stone, and, making a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes 
off with a run, and they pursue him and pelt him with stones, 
and heap curses on him, as though transferring the pollution of the 
thing on to him. 

The Plight-Ceremony recorded by Plutarch’ is specially instruc- 
tive, and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the 
Bouphonia, is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th 
Greek Question, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals 
celebrated every eighth year at Delphi was one called Stepterion*, 
and in another discourse (De defect. orac. XIv.) he describes the 
rite practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological 
mythology that it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. 
This much is clear; every eighth year a hut («advas) was set up 
about the threshing-floor at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore 
more resemblance to a kingly palace than to a snake’s lair; we 
may therefore safely infer that it held a snake. A boy with both 


112s We lle (8 

2 Diod. 1. 91 caBarepel 7d woos eis Exetvov TpeTdvTwr. 

3 Plut. De defect. orac. x1v., the text is in places corrupt. 

4 I have elsewhere (J.H.S. x1x. 1899, p. 223) stated that the word ‘ Stepterion ’ 
cannot to my thinking be translated ‘Festival of Crowning.’ This explanation 
rests only on Aelian (Hist. An. xt. 34), and purification (kd@apots, éxOvors), not 
crowning, is the main gist of the ceremonies. The name Stepterion, is, I suspect, 
connected with the enigmatic cré¢n and orépew as occurring in Aesch. Choeph. 94, 
Soph. Ant. 431, Elec. 52, 458, and means in some way purification. 


H. 8 


114 Harvest Festivals — [ CH. 


his parents alive was led up by a certain prescribed way! with 
lighted torches ; fire was set to the hut, a table overturned, and 
the celebrants took flight without looking back through the 
gates of the precinct ; afterwards the boy went off to Tempe, fasted, 
dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in solemn 
procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake, but 
as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of 
the slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may 
be inferred. Plutarch is of course more suo shocked at the idea that 
Apollo could need purification, and at a loss to account decently 
for the curious ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark : ‘ finally 
the wanderings and the servitude of the boy and the purifications 
at Tempe raise a suspicion of some great pollution and deed of 
daring’ (ueyadou Tivds ayous Kal ToAuwnpaTos UToiay ExouCL). 
This hits the mark: a sacred snake has been slain; the slayer has 
incurred an @yos, from which he must be purified. The slaying is 
probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to the hut with 
all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the purpose ; 
but the toAunya, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an ayos, so he 
must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or 
sacred ox, or human victim, the procedure is the same. 


To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony 
of the pharmakos is briefly this: the gist of the pharmakos rite is 
physical purification, cafappods, and this notion, sometimes alone, 
sometimes combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is 
the idea underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to 
call Human Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in 
a primitive state of civilization the line between human and 
animal ‘sacrifice’ is not sharply drawn. 


KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA. 


Plutarch’ tells us that it was on a day of ill-omen that 
Alcibiades returned to Athens: ‘On the day of his return they 
were solemnizing the Plynteria to the Goddess. For on the 6th 


1 Other instances are given Ael. Hist. An. xu. 34, Philostr. Im. m. 24. 850. 
For analogous Roman Festivals see Regifugium and Poplifugia, Warde-Fowler, 
Roman Festivals, pp. 327 and 174. For the Stepterion and savage analogies see 
Dr Frazer, Pausanias, vol. mm. p. 53. 

2 Plut. Vit. Alc. xxxiv. 


e 


Ir | Kallynteria, Plynteria 115 


day of the third part of Thargelia the Praxiergidae solemnize the 


rites that may not be disclosed: they take off the adornments 
of the image, and cover it up. Hence the Athenians account this 


day as most unlucky of all, and do no work on it. And it seemed 
as though the Goddess were receiving him in no friendly or kindly 
fashion, as she hid her face from him and seemed to banish him 
from her presence. At the Plynteria, as at other ‘unlucky’ 
_ festivals, the sanctuaries, Pollux’ tells us, were roped round. The 
object was in part to keep out the common herd, perhaps primarily 
to ‘avert’ evil influences. 

Photius’ discusses the two festivals, the Kallynteria and the 
Plynteria, together, placing the Kallynteria first ; they have indeed 
practically always been bracketed in the minds of commentators 
as substantially identical in content. The Plynteria, it is usually 
stated, was the washing festival. The image of Pallas was taken 
in solemn procession down to the sea, stripped of its gear, veiled 
from the eyes of the vulgar, washed in sea-water, and brought 
back. At the Kallynteria it was re-dressed, re-decked, ‘ beautified.’ 
This simple explanation of the sequence of rites presents only one 
trifling difficulty. Photius expressly tells us that the Kallynteria 
preceded the Plynteria; the Kallynteria took place on the 19th of 
the month Thargelion, and the Plynteria on the second day of the 
3rd decade, i.e. on the 22nd*. It would be strange if the image 


was first ‘beautified’ and then washed. The explanation of the , 


seeming incongruity is of course a simple one. The word caddvvew 
means not only ‘to beautify’ but to brush out, to sweep, ‘to give 
a shine to. The Greek for broom is caddvvtpiov, also KaX<d>vp- 
tpov in Hesych. s.v. capov; and kad\dvopuara, if we may trust 
Hesychius‘, means sweepings (capyata). In a word the Kallyn- 
teria is a festival of what the Romans call everruncatio, the 
festival of ‘those who do the sweeping. They swept out the 
sacred places, made them as we say now-a-days ‘ beautifully clean,’ 
and then, having done their sweeping first like good housewives, 
when the house was ready they washed the image and brought it 
back in new shining splendour. 

It is evident that when we hear of sweeping out sanctuaries 


1 Poll: On. vit. 141. 2 Phot. s.v. Ka\\vyrjpia. 

3 Plutarch and Photius cannot both be right, but it is unlikely that Photius 
would give the sequence incorrectly. 

4 Hesych. s.v. cdpuara. 


8—2 


4 
yi 


¢ 


A) 


116 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


and washing an image we have come to a religious stage in which 
there is a definite god worshipped, and that god is conceived of as 
anthropomorphic. There may have been rites of the Thargelia, 
including the Pharmakos, i.e. the ceremony of the expulsion of evil, 
before there were any Kallynteria~ or Plynteria. Be this as it 
may, the Kallynteria and Plynteria throw light on the purport of 
the pharmakos, and emphasize the fact that all the cleansing, 
whether of image, sanctuary or people, was but a preliminary to 
the bringing in of the first-fruits. 

' This connection between first-fruits and purification explains 
a feature in the Plynteria that would otherwise remain obscure. 
In the procession that took place at the Plynteria, probably, though 
not quite certainly, the procession in which the image was taken 
down to the sea, Hesychius! tells us they carried a cake or mass of 
dried figs, which went by the name of Hegeteria. Hesychius is at 
no loss to account for the strange name. Figs were the first culti- 
vated fruit of which man partook; the cake of figs is called 
Hegeteria because it ‘ Led the Way’ in the matter of diet! 

We may perhaps be allowed to suggest a possible alterna- 
tive. May not the fig-cake be connected with the root of ayos 
rather than with adyw? Figs were used in purification. Is not 
the Hegeteria the fig-cake of purification? A necklace of figs was 
hung about the neck of the pharmakos, and the statues of the gods 
had sometimes a like adornment. Primitive man is apt to get 
a little confused as to cause and effect. He performs a rite of 
purification to protect his first-fruits; he comes to think the 
offering of those first-fruits is in itself a rite of purification. 

As usual when we come to consider the analogous Roman 
festival the meaning of the rites practised is more baldly obvious. 
Plutarch? in his Roman Questions asks, ‘Why did not the Romans 
marry in the month of May?’ and for once he hits upon the right 
answer: ‘May it be that in this month they perform the greatest 
of purificatory ceremonies?’ What these purificatory ceremonies, 
these xaappoi, were, he tells us explicitly: ‘for at the present 
day they throw images from the bridge into the river, but in old 
times they used to throw human beings.’ We must here separate 
sharply the fact stated by Plutarch, the actual ritual that took 


: Hesych. s.v. nynrnpla* mapa hyjcacba obv ris TpopAs KéxAnrac Hynrnpla. 
2 Plut. Q.R. Lxxxvr. 


| The Vestalia 117 


place in his own day, from his conjecture about the past. We 
know images, puppets, were thrown from the bridge, we may con- 
jecture, as Plutarch did, that they were the surrogates of human 
sacrifice, but we must carefully bear in mind that this is pure con- 
jecture. The fact Plutarch certifies in another of his Questions’, 
and adds the name of the puppets. ‘ What,’ he asks, ‘is the reason 
that in the month of May they throw images of human beings 
from the wooden bridge into the river, calling them Argeioi ?’ 
Ovid’ tells us a little more: ‘Then (i.e. on May 15th) the Vestal 
is wont to throw from the oaken bridge the images of men of old 
times, made of rushes. He adds that it was in obedience to an 
oracle: ‘Ye nations, throw two bodies in sacrifice to the Ancient 
One who bears the sickle, bodies to be received by the Tuscan 
streams.’ Ovid and Plutarch clearly both held that the Argez 
of rushes were surrogates. It seems possible, on the other hand, 
that the myth of human sacrifice may have arisen from a merely 
dramatic apotropaic rite. The one certain thing is that the Arge7* 
were pharmakoi, were ca@appata. 

That the time of the Argei, and indeed the whole month till 
the Ides of June, was unlucky is abundantly proved by the conduct 
of the Flaminica. Plutarch* goes on to say that the Flaminica 
is wont to be gloomy (cxv@pwrafewv) and not to wash nor to 
adorn herself. Ovid? adds details of this mourning; he tells us 
that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis as to the marriage of his 
daughter, and learnt that till the Ides of June there was no luck 
for brides and their husbands, ‘for thus did the holy bride of the 
Dialis speak to me: “ Until tranquil Tiber has borne to the sea in 
his tawny waters the cleansings from Ilan Vesta it is not lawful 
for me to comb my shorn locks with the boxwood, nor to pare my 
nails with iron, nor to touch my husband though he be priest of 
Jove....Be not in haste. Better will thy daughter marry when 
Vesta of the Fire shines with a cleansed hearth.”’ 

The Roman Vestalia fell a little later than the Kallynteria and 


2 Jeihwain (Q)2te seo 

2 Ov. Fasti v. 621. 

3 The whole ceremony of the Argei has been fully discussed by Mr Warde- 
Fowler (The Roman Festivals, p. 111). Abundant primitive analogies have been 
collected by Mannhardt (Bawmkultus, pp. 155, 411, 416, and Antike Wald- und 
Feldkulte, p. 276). For the etymology of Argei see Mr A. B. Cook, Class. Rev. xvi. 
1903, p. 269. 

* Plut. Q. R. uxxxv1. 5 Ov. Fasti v1. 219—234. 


118 Harvest Festivals [ CH. 


Plynteria, but their content is the same. I borrow the account of 
the ritual of the Vestalia from Mr Warde-Fowler?. On June 7 
the penus, or innermost sanctuary of Vesta, which was shut all the 
rest of the year and to which no man but the pontifex maximus 
had at any time right of entry, was thrown open to all matrons. 
During the seven following days they crowded to it barefoot. 
The object of this was perhaps to pray for a blessing on the house- 
hold. On plain and old-fashioned ware offerings of food were 
carried into the temple: the Vestals themselves offered the sacred 
cakes made of the first ears of corn, plucked as we saw in the early 
days of May; bakers and millers kept holiday, all mills were 
garlanded and donkeys decorated with wreaths and cakes. On 
June 15 the temple (aedes) was swept and the refuse taken away 
and either thrown into the Tiber or deposited in some particular 
spot. Then the dies nefasti came to an end, and the 15th itself 
became fastus as soon as the last act of cleansing had been duly 
performed. Quando stercus delatum fas, ‘When the rubbish has 
been carried away.’ 

Dr Frazer? has collected many savage parallels to the rites of 
the Vestalia. The most notable is the busk or festival of first- 
fruits among the Creek Indians of North America, held in July or 
August when the corn is ripe. Before the celebration of the busk 
no Indian would eat or even touch the new corn. In preparation 
for its rites they got new clothes and household utensils: old 
clothes, rubbish of all kinds, and the old corn that remained were 
carefully burnt. The village fires were put out and the ashes 
swept away, and in particular the hearth and altar of the temple 
were dug up and cleaned out. The public square was carefully 
swept out ‘for fear of polluting the first-fruit offerings.’ Before 
the sacramental eating of the new corn a strict fast was observed, 
and (for the precautions taken by the savage ritualist are searching 
and logical) a strong purgative was swallowed. With the new 
corn was solemnly dispensed the freshly-kindled fire, and the priest 
publicly announced that the new divine fire had purged away the 
sins of the past year. Such powerful ‘medicine’ was the new 
corn that some of the men rubbed their new corn between their 
hands, then on their faces and breasts. 


1 Warde-Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 148. 
2 Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed., vol, 11. p. 329. 


| Purification and Sacrifice 119 


To resume. In the Anthesteria we have seen that sacrifice 
was in intent purification, and that this purification took the form 
of the placation of ghosts. In the Thargelia, purification is again 
the end and aim of sacrifice, but this purification, though it 
involves the taking of a human life, is of the nature of a merely 
magical cleansing to prepare for the incoming first-fruits, 

We pass to the consideration of the autumn festival of sowing, 
the Thesmophoria. 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE WOMEN’S FESTIVALS. 


THESMOPHORIA, ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA, STENIA, HALOA. 
‘TA Becmoopl AroYCIN GscTIep KAI TIPO TOY. 
The Thesmophoria. 


WirTH the autumn festival of the Thesmophoria* we come to a 
class of rites of capital interest. They were practised by women 
only and were of immemorial antiquity. Although, for reasons 
explained at the outset, they are considered after the Anthesteria 
and Thargelia, their character was even more primitive, and, 
owing to the conservative character of women and the mixed 
contempt and superstition with which such rites were regarded by 
men, they were preserved in pristine purity down to late days. 
Unlike the Diasia, Anthesteria, Thargelia, they were left almost 
uncontaminated by Olympian usage, and—a point of supreme 
interest—under the influence of a new religious impulse, they 
issued at last in the most widely influential of all Greek cere- 
monials, the Eleusinian Mysteries. 

To the primitive character and racial origin of these rites 
we have the witness of Herodotus’, though unhappily piety sealed 
his lips as to details. He says, ‘Concerning the feast of Demeter 
which the Greeks call Thesmophoria I must preserve an auspi- 
cious silence, excepting in so far as every one may speak of it. 
It was the daughters of Danaus who introduced this rite from 


! The sources for the Thesmophoria are collected and discussed by Dr J. G, 
Frazer, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Art. Thesmophoria. 


21, 171. See also Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p.-29; Harrison and Verrall, 
Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, pp. xxxiv. and 102—105 and 482; A. Lang, Homeric 


Hymns, Introd. Essay and Hymn to Demeter. 


OL rv | ~ * Kathodos and Anodos 123t 


Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; but after the upset 
of the whole of Peloponnesos by the Dorians the rite died down 
completely, and it was only those of the Peloponnesians who were 
left, and the Arcadians who did not leave their seats who kept it 
up. Herodotus oddly enough does not mention the Athenians, 
who were as stable and as untouched as the Arcadians, but his 
notice is invaluable as fixing the pre-Dorian character of the rites. 
Knowing that they were of immemorial antiquity, more suo he 
attributes them to the Egyptians, and as will later be seen (p. 128) 
there may be some element of probability in his supposition. 

The Thesmophoria, like the Anthesteria, was a three days’ 
festival. It was held from the 11th—13th of Pyanepsion (October 
—November); the first day, the 11th, was called both Kathodos 
and Anodos, Downgoing and Uprising, the second Nesteza, Fasting, 
and the third Kalligeneia, Fair-Born or Fair-Birth*. The mean- 
ing of the name Thesmophoria and the significance of the three 
several days will appear later: at present it is sufficient to note 
that the Thesmophoria collectively was a late autumn festival 
and certainly connected with sowing. Cornutus” says, ‘they fast 
in honour of Demeter...when they celebrate her feast at the season 
of sowing. Of a portion of the ritual of the Thesmophoria we 
have an unusually detailed account preserved to us by a scholiast 
on the Hetairae of Lucian ; and as this portion is, for the under- 
standing of the whole festival, of capital importance it must at 
the outset be examined in detail. In the dialogue of Lucian, 
Myrto is reproaching Pamphilos for deserting her; ‘the girl, says 
Myrto, ‘you are going to marry is not good-looking; I saw her 
close at hand at the Thesmophoria with her mother.’ The notice 
is important as it has been asserted that the Thesmophoria was 
a festival of married women only, which, in Lucian’s time, was 
clearly not the case. 

The scholiast® on the passage comments as follows, and ancient 


1 Schol. ad Aristoph. Thesm. 78. Photius, s.v. and Schol. ad Aristoph. Thesm. 
585. 

2 Cornut. de Theol. 28. 

% Lucian, Dial. Meretr. 11. 1, first published and commented on by E. Rohde, 
Rhein. Mus. xxv. p. 549. As the text is not very easily accessible it is given below: 
Oecuopopia éoprh “HAAjvwr pvotipia mepiéxovoa. Ta 6é attra Kai cKkippogddpra 
“Kadetrat. Hyero 6€ kata Tov wvOwWOEcTEpov Néyor, bTL avAodoyovca npTagero 7 Képy 
td Tod IovTwvos. tore Kar’ éxeivov Tov Tbmov EvBouNev’s Tis ovBwrns eveuev vs Kal 
ouykareTOOnoay Te XaopuaT. THS Képys. eis otv Tiunv Tod EvBouéws plrtecbar Tovds 
Xotpous eis TA XdouaTa THS Anjuntpos kal THs Képns. ta dé carévta TeV EuBAnBevTw 


122. The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


commentators have left us few commentaries more instructive: 
‘The Thesmophoria, a festival of the Greeks, including mysteries, 
and these are called also Skirrophoria. According to the more 
mythological explanation they are celebrated in that Kore when 
she was gathering flowers was carried off by Plouton. At the time 
a certain Eubouleus, a swineherd, was feeding his swine on the 
spot and they were swallowed down with her in the chasm of Kore. 
Hence in honour of Eubouleus the swine are thrown into the 
chasms of Demeter and Kore. Certain women who have purified 
themselves for three days* and who bear the name of ‘Drawers up’ 
bring up the rotten portions of the swine that have been cast 
into the megara. And they descend into the inner sanctuaries 
and having brought up (the remains) they place them on the 
altars, and they hold that whoever takes of the remains and mixes 
it with his seed will have a good crop. And they say that in and 
about the chasms are snakes which consume the most part of 
what is thrown in; hence a rattling din is made when the women 
draw up the remains and when they replace the remains by those 
well-known (éxeiva) images, in order that the snakes which they 
hold to be the guardians of the sanctuaries may go away. 

‘The same rites are called Arretophoria (carrying of things 
unnamed) and are performed with the same intent concerning the 
growth of crops and of human offspring. In the case of the 
Arretophoria, too, sacred things that may not be named and that 
are made of cereal paste, are carried about, i.e. images of snakes 
and of the forms of men*® They employ also fir-cones on account 
els Ta péyapa KaTavape povow dv T qT pLat KaNovmevar yuvackes, kabapevoarat T play TMEpav. 
kal KaraBalvovowy eis Ta dura kal dvevéyxaca émitiOéacw émi Tav Bwyd. Gy 
voulfovge Tov AauBavovra Kal Te ombpwy ouyKaraBarrdovra eUpoplay ee. Néyouor dé 
Kal dpdkovras Kkdtw elvar mepl Ta XdoMaTa, 0 ods Ta TOAAG TOY BAnOev Taw KkateoGlew* dd 
Kal Kporov yeveo Ga érav avT\Gow al yuvatkes Kal drav dmoravrat wadnw To hag mara 
éxeiva, wa avaxwpnowow ol dpaxovres obs vouifourt ppovpods Tw advrwr. Ta dé avira 
Kal dppyTopopta Kaetrat, Kal dyerau Tov avrov Néyov €xovTa mepi THs TOV kapTav 
yevéoews kal TAS TaY avOpdimrwy omopas. dvaépovTat 0€ KavTavba dppyra i iepa €k oTEéaTOS 
Tov olrov KkaTeckevacnéva, miuhpata SpakdvTwy Kal dvdpav oxnuarwv. NauBavovor dé 
Ka@vou Oaddods Sra Td Tor’yovoy Tov puTov. EuBdddovTa dé Kal els TA méyapa olTws 
kadovmeva dduTa exetvd Te Kal yotpa ws Hdn Epamev, kal adrol did 7d wodvToKoy, els 
oivOnua THs yevérews Tov Kaptur Kal TOY dvOpwHTwY, ws xapoTHpa TH Anunrpe érerd) 
Tov Onunrpiov Kaprov mapéxovoa emrolnoev Huepov TO Twv avOpwrwy yévos. O meV odV 
dvw THs €opriHs Nbyos 6 wvOiKds* 6 5é mpoKelwevos Hucikds* Oecuopdpia Kadetrac Kabdre 
Oecunopdpos 7 Anunrnp Katovoudterat, TUcioa vouov Fro Oecudv Kad’ ods Thy Tpophy 
moplfecdal te kal KatepyaverOar avOpwrovs déov. 

1 The rites of purification included strict chastity, for the purport of which 
as a conservation of energy see Dr Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. u. p. 210. 


2 wynmara...dvipwv axnudrwvr, i.e, @ddror. Cf. Septuagint, Is. iii. 17. The 
Arrephoroi are not as I previously (Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. XXxiv.) 










Iv | Kathodos and Anodos 123 


of the fertility of the tree, and into the sanctuaries called megara 
these are cast and also, as we have already said, swine—the 
swine, too, on account of their prolific character—in token of the 
growth of fruits and human beings, as a thank-offering to Demeter,. 
inasmuch as she, by providing the grain called by her name, 
civilized the human race. The interpretation then of the festival 
given above is mythological, but the one we give now is physical. 
The name Thesmophoria is given because Demeter bears the title 
Thesmophoros, since she laid down a law or Thesmos in accordance 
with which it was incumbent on men to obtain and provide by 
labour their nurture.’ / 

The main outline of the ritual, in spite of certain obscurities in 
the scholiast’s account, is clear. At some time not specified, but 
during the Thesmophoria, women, carefully purified for the purpose, 
let down pigs into clefts or chasms called péyapa or chambers. 
At some other time not precisely specified they descended into 
the megara, brought up the rotten flesh and placed it on certain 
altars, whence it was taken and mixed with seed to serve as 
a fertility charm. As the first day of the festival was called both 
Kathodos and Anodos it seems likely that the women went down 
and came up the same day, but as the flesh of the pigs was rotten 
some time must have elapsed. It is therefore conjectured that 
the flesh was left to rot for a whole year, and that the women 
on the first day took down the new pigs and brought up last 
year’s pigs. 

How long the pigs were left to rot does not affect the general 
content of the festival. It is of more importance to note that the 
flesh seems to have been regarded as in some sort the due of the 
powers of the earth as represented by the guardian snakes. The 
flesh was wanted by men as a fertility charm, but the snakes it 
was thought might demand part of it; they were scared away, but 
to compensate for what they did not. get, surrogates made of cereal 
paste had to be taken down. These paste surrogates were in the 
form of things specially fertile. It is not quite clear whether 
the pine-cones etc. or only the pigs were let down at the Thesmo- 


suggested Hersephoroi, Carriers of Young Things. Suidas, it may be noted, has 
the formally impossible word dppyvogopeiv. It may have arisen from a paronomasia 
and seems to point in the same direction as the uimjuata avdpey cxnudtwv of the 
scholiast. On the use of the ¢d4\)\os among agriculturalists as a prophylactic against 
the evil eye and éy rats TeXerals...cxédov amdoats, see Diod. tv. 6. 


a, 


124 The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


phoria as well as the Arrephoria, but as the scholiast is con- 
tending for the close analogy of both festivals this seems probable. 
It does not indeed much matter what the exact form of the sacra 
was: all were fertility charms. 

The remarks of the scholiast about the double Xdyos, ie. the 
double rationale of the festival, are specially instructive. By his 
time, and indeed probably long before, educated people had ceased 
to believe that by burying a fertile animal or a fir-cone in the 
earth you could induce the earth to be fertile; they had advanced 
beyond the primitive logic of ‘sympathetic magic.” But the 
Thesmophoria was still carried on by conservative womanhood : 


‘They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.’ 


An origin less crude and revolting to common sense is required 
and promptly supplied by mythology’. Kore had been carried 


down into a cleft by Plouton: therefore in her memory the women 


went down and came up. Pigs had been swallowed down at the 
same time: therefore they took pigs with them. Such a mytho- 
logical rationale was respectable if preposterous. The myth of 
the rape of Persephone of course really arose from the ritual, not 
the ritual from the myth. In the back of his mind the schohast 
knows that the content of the ritual was ‘ physical, the object the 
impulsion of nature. But even after he has given the true content 
his mind clouds over with modern associations. The festival, he 
says, 1s a ‘thank-offering’ to Demeter. But in the sympathetic 
magic of the Thesmophoria man attempts direct compulsion, he 
admits no mediator between himself and nature, and he thanks 
no god for what no god has done. A thank-offering is later even 
than a prayer, and prayer as yet is not. To mark the transition 
from rites of compulsion to rites of supplication and consequent 
thanksgiving is to read the whole religious history of primitive 
man. 

Some details of the rites of the Thesmophoria remain to be 
noted. The Thesmophoria, though, thanks to Aristophanes, we 
know them best at Athens, were widespread throughout Greece. 


The ceremony of the pigs went on at Potniae in Boeotia. The 


passage in which Pausanias® describes it is most unfortunately 


1 The influence of mimetic ritual on the development of mythology will be 
considered later, p. 279. 
ede be teh le 


-_——_— 


Iv] The Megara 125 


corrupt; but he adds one certain detail, that the pigs there used 
were new-born, sucking pigs (vs tay veoyvev). Among nations 
more savage than the Greeks a real Kore took the place of the 
Greek sucking pig or rather reinforced it. Among the Khonds, 
as Mr Andrew Lang’ has pointed out, pigs and a woman are 
sacrificed that the land may be fertilized by their blood; the 
Pawnees of North America, down to the middle of the present 
century, sacrificed a girl obtained by preference from the alien 
tribe of the Sioux, but among the Greeks there is no evidence 
that the pigs were surrogates. 

The megara themselves are of some importance; the name still 
survives in the modern Greek form Megara. Megara appear to 
have been natural clefts or chasms helped out later by art. As 
such they were at first the natural places for rites intended to 
compel the earth; later they became definite sanctuaries of earth 
divinities. In America, according to Mr Lang’s account, Gypsies, 
Pawnees, and Shawnees bury the sacrifices they make to the 
Earth Goddess in the earth, in natural crevices or artificial crypts. 
In the sanctuary of Demeter, at Cnidos, Sir Charles Newton’ 
found a crypt which had originally been circular and later had 
been compressed by earthquake. Among the contents were bones 
of pigs and other animals, and the marble pigs which now stand 
near the Demeter of Cnidos in the British Museum. It is of 
importance to note that Porphyry*, in his Cave of the Nymphs, 
says, that for the Olympian gods are set up temples and images 
and altars (S@povs), for the chthonic gods and heroes hearths 
(€cxapar), for those below the earth (i7oyGoviows) there are 
trenches and megara. Philostratos‘, in his Life of Apollonius, says, 
‘The chthonic gods welcome trenches and ceremonies done in the 
hollow earth.’ 

Eustathius’® says that megara are ‘underground dwellings of 
the two goddesses, i. Demeter and Persephone, and he adds 
that ‘ Aelian says the word is wayapov not péyapor and that it is 
the place in which the mystical sacred objects are placed.’ Unless 
this suggestion is adopted the etymology of the word remains 


1 Nineteenth Century, April, 1887. 

2 Newton, C. T., Discoveries at Halicarnassus, vol. 11. p. 383, and Travels and 
Discoveries in the Levant, i. p. 180. 

° Porphyr. de antro Nymph. v1. 

= Sri al lala Sy ’ > Kustath. § 1387. 


126 The Thesmophoria , [ CH. 


obscure’. The word itself, meaning at first a cave-dwelling, lived 
on in the megaron of kings’ palaces and the temples of Olympian 
gods, and the shift of meaning marks the transition from under to 
upper-world rites. 

Art has left us no certain representation of the Thesmophoria ; 
but in the charming little vase-painting from a lekythos in 
the National Museum at Athens*, a woman is represented 
sacrificing a pig. He is obviously held over a trench and the 





three planted torches indicate an underworld service. In her 
left hand the woman holds a basket, no doubt containing sacra. 
There seems a reminiscence of the rites of the Thesmophoria, 
though we cannot say that they are actually represented. 


It is practically certain that the ceremonies of the burying 
and resurrection of the pigs took place on the first day of the 
Thesmophoria called variously the Kathodos and the Anodos. It 
is further probable from the name Kalligeneia, Fairborn, that on 
the third day took place the strewing of the rotten flesh on the 
fields. The second, intervening day, also called péon, the middle 
day, was a solemn fast, Nesteia; probably on this day the magical 
sacra lay upon the altars where the women placed them. The 


1 Dr Frazer reminds me that Prof. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, 
p. 183) derived péyapov from the Phoenician maghar, Hebrew meghara ‘a cave.’ 
The form payapov adduced by Aelian, favours this view; cf. also Photius s.v. udyapor" 
od péyapov, els 6 Ta word lepa kataTlOevrac’ otrws Mévavdpos. 

2 Heydemann, Griechische Vasenbilder, Taf. u. 3. For a somewhat similar 
design cf. Brit. Mus. Cat. w 819. 


/ 


Iv] The Nesteia , 127 


strictness of this fast made it proverbial. On this day prisoners 
were released, the law courts were closed, the Boule could not 
meet’. Athenaeus mentions the fast when he is discussing 
different kinds of fish. One of the Cynics comes in and says: 
‘My friends too are keeping a fast as if this were the middle day 
of the Thesmophoria since we are feasting like cestreis’; the 
cestreus being non-carnivorous. 

The women fasted sitting on the ground, and hence arose the 
aetiological myth that Demeter herself, the desolate mother 


? 


fasted sitting on the ‘Smileless Stone. Apollodorus?, in recount- 
ing the sorrows of Demeter, says: ‘ and first she sat down on 
the stone that is called after her “Smileless” by the side of the 
“Well of Fair Dances.”’ The ‘Well of Fair Dances’ has come 
to light at Eleusis, and there, too, was found a curious monu- 
ment* which shows how the Eleusinians made the goddess in 
their own image. In fig. 12 we have a votive relief of the usual 





Bran be: 


1 Marcellinus on Hermog. in Rhet. Graec., ed. Walz, 1v. 462. Sopater, ibid. 
vit. 67. Aristoph. Thesm. 80. Dr Frazer kindly suggests to me that the custom of 
releasing prisoners at the Thesmophoria may be explained as a precaution against 
the magical influence of knots, fetters, and the like in trammeling spiritual activities 
whether for good or evil, cf. Golden Bough, 2nd ed. 1. p. 392 sqq. 

2 Apollod. 1. 5. 1. 3 Ath. Mitt. 1899, Taf. vii. 1. 





Nie 


128 The Thesmophoria 3 [ CH, 


type, a procession of worshippers bearing offerings to a seated 
goddess. But the goddess is not seated goddess-fashion on a 
throne; she is the Earth mother, and she crouches as the fasting 
women crouched on her own earth. 

A passage in which Plutarch speaks of the women fasting is 
of great importance for the understanding of the general gist 
of the festival. In the discourse on Isis and Osiris’ he is struck 
_ by the general analogy of certain agricultural ceremonies in Egypt 
and Greece, and makes the following instructive remarks: ‘ How 
are we to deal with sacrifices of a gloomy, joyless and melancholy 
character if it be not well either to omit traditional ceremonies, 
or to upset our views about the gods or confuse them by pre- 
posterous conjectures? And among the Greeks also many 
analogous things take place about the same time of the year as 
that in which the Egyptians perform their sacred ceremonies, 
e.g. at Athens the women fast at the Thesmophoria seated on the 
ground, and the Boeotians stir up the megara of Achaia, calling 
that festival grievous (ésray64), inasmuch as Demeter was in grief 
(€v axe), on account of the descent of her daughter. And that 
month about the rising of the Pleiades is the month of sowing 
which the Egyptians call Athor, and the Athenians Pyanepsion 
(bean month), and the Boeotians Damatrion. And Theopompos 
relates that those who dwell towards the West account and call 
the Winter Kronos, and the Summer Aphrodite, and the Spring 
Persephone, and from Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their 
birth. And the Phrygians think that in the Winter the god is 
asleep, and that in the Summer he is awake, and they celebrate 
to him revels which in winter are Goings-to-sleep and in summer 
Wakings-up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in winter 
the god is bound down and imprisoned, and-in spring aroused 
and set free again.’ 

Whatever be the meaning of the difficult Achaza? Plutarch 
has hit upon the truth. Common to all the peoples bordering 


1 Plut. de Is. et Os. Lxtx. 

2 As to the meaning of the difficult word ’Axaia I oo offer nothing 
satisfactory. It is perhaps worth noting that Athenaeus (r11. 109), on the 
authority of Semos, mentions a sort of cake called ’Axativa, ait was made on- 
the occasion of the Thesmophoria; the people who carried it are said to haye 
exclaimed ‘Munch an Achaina full of fat,’ émuéyoures Trav pepbytwy ‘’Axalvny oréaros 
éurdewy Tpdyov.’ ‘The scholiast on Ar. Ach. 709 says that Demeter got her name of 
Achaia dmd rod xrimov Tav KupBadtwy Kal TuuTavwr TOU yevouévou Kara Ohrnow ris 
Képys, and he may be right. 








oy | Plutarch’s Anthropology 129 


on the Aegean and, had he known it, to many another primitive 
race, were ceremonies of which the gist was pantomime, the 
mimicking of nature’s processes, in a word the ritual of sympathetic 
magic. The women fasted seated on the ground because the earth 
was desolate; they rose and revelled, they stirred the megara to 
mimic the impulse of spring. Then when they knew no longer 
why they did these things they made a goddess their protagonist. 

Plutarch! has made for himself in his own image his ‘ideal’ 
Greek gods, serene, cheerful, beneficent ; but he is a close observer 
of facts, and he sees there are ceremonies—‘sacrifices’ (@vetav) in 
his late fashion he calls them—which are ‘mournful, ‘gloomy, 
‘smileless. Who and what are these gods who demand fasting 
and lamentation? He must either blink the facts of acknow- 
ledged authorized ritual—this he cannot and will not do, for he 
is an honest man—or he must confuse and confound his conceptions 
of godhead. Caught on the horns of this dilemma he betakes 
himself to comparative anthropology and notes analogies among 
adjacent and more primitive peoples. 

Of two other elements in the Thesmophoria we have brief 
notice from the lexicographers. Hesychius? says of the word 
diwyua (pursuit), ‘a sacrifice at Athens, performed in secret by 
the women at the Thesmophoria. The same was later called 
arodiwypya. From Suidas? we learn that it was also called 
Xarx«idixov diwypa, the ‘ Chalcidian pursuit,’ and Suidas of course 
gives a historical explanation. Only one thing is clear, that the 
ceremony must have belonged to the general class of ‘ pursuit’ 
rituals which have already been discussed in relation to the 
Thargelia. 

The remaining ceremony is known to us only from Hesychius*. 
He says, ‘ &nuia (penalty), a sacrifice offered on account of the 
things done at the Thesmophoria.’ 

Of the Thesmophoria as celebrated at Eretria we are told two 
characteristic particulars. Plutarch, in his Greek Questions’, asks, 
‘Why in the Thesmophoria do the Eretrian women cook their 


1 Plut. loc. cit. was otv xpnoréov éoti rats oKxvOpwrais cal ayeddoros Kal 
mevOivos Ovoias ef re wapadureiv Ta vevomopuéva Kah@s Exel, unre Pipey Tas epi 
Geay ddEas Kal cuvTapaTrew broiats ardrots; 

2 Hesych. s.v. dlwyua. 3 Suid. s.v. 

4 Hesych. s.v. (nula: Ovola ris drodiouévn rep Tay yevouevun év Oecnogoplos. 
It is possible, I think, that ¢juéa may conceal some form connected with Damia. 

Peblut. QO Gra xxx, 


H. 9 


130 The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


meat not by fire but by the sun, and why do they not invoke 
Kalligeneia?’ The solutions suggested by Plutarch for these 
difficulties are not happy. The use of the sun in place of fire is 
probably a primitive trait; m Greece to-day it is not difficult to 
cook a piece of meat to a palatable point on a stone by the rays 
of the burning midday sun, and in early days the practice was 
probably common enough; it might easily be retained in an archaic 
ritual. Kalligeneia also presents no serious difficulty, the word 
means ‘fair-born’ or ‘fair-birth. It may be conjectured that the 
reference was at first to the good crop produced by the rotten pigs’ 
flesh. With the growth of anthropomorphism the ‘good crop’ 
would take shape as Kore the ‘fair-born,’ daughter of earth. Of 
such developments more will be said when we discuss (p. 276) the 
general question of ‘the making of a goddess.’ A conservative 
people such as the Eretrians seem to have been would be slow to 
adopt any such anthropomorphic development. 

Another particular as regards the Thesmophoria generally is 
preserved for us by Aelian in his History of Animals’; speaking of 
the plant Agnos (the Agnus castus), he says, ‘In the Thesmo- 
phoria the Attic women used to strew it on their couches and it 
(the Agnos) is accounted hostile to reptiles.’ He goes on to say 
that the plant was primarily used to keep off snakes, to the attacks 
of which the women in their temporary booths would be specially 
exposed. Then as it was an actual preventive of one evil it 
became a magical purity charm. Hence its name. 

The pollution of death, like marriage, was sufficient to exclude 
the women of the house from keeping the Thesmophoria. 
Athenaeus’” tells us that Democritus of Abdera, wearied of his 
extreme old age, was minded to put an end to himself by refusing 
all food; but the women of his house implored him to live on till 
the Thesmophoria was over in order that they might be able to 
keep the festival; so he obligingly kept himself alive on a pot 
of honey. 

An important and easily intelligible particular is noted by 
Isaeus* in his oration About the Estate of Pyrrhos. The question 
comes up, ‘Was Pyrrhos lawfully married?’ Isaeus asks, ‘If he 
were married, would he not have been obliged, on behalf of his 
lawful wife, to feast the women at the Thesmophoria and to 

1 ix. 26. * Athen, 11. 26 § 46. 3 Is. Pyrr. Hered. 80. 


Iv] Arrephoria 131 


perform all the other customary dues in his deme on behalf of his 
wife, his property being what it was?’ This is one of the passages 
on which the theory has been based that the Thesmophoria was 
a rite performed by married women only. It really points the other 
way; a man when he married by thus obtaining exclusive rights 
over one woman violated the old matriarchal usages and may have 
had to make his peace with the community by paying the 
expenses of the Thesmophoria feast. 

Before passing to the consideration of the etymology and 
precise meaning of the word Thesmophoria, the other women 
festivals must be briefly noted, ie. the Arrephoria or Arreto- 
phoria, the Skirophoria or Skira, and the Stenia. 


ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA, STENTA. 


The scholiast on Lucian, as we have already seen, expressly notes 
that the Arretophoria and Skirophoria were of similar content 
with the Thesmophoria. Clement of Alexandria’, a dispassionate 
witness, confirms this view. ‘Do you wish,’ he asks, ‘ that I should 
recount for you the Flower-gatherings of Pherephatta and the 
basket, and the rape by Aidoneus, and the cleft of the earth, and 
the swine of Eubouleus, swallowed down with the goddesses, on 
which account in the Thesmophoria they cast down living swine 
in the megara? This piece of mythology the women in their 
festivals celebrate in diverse fashion in the city, dramatizing the 
rape of Pherephatta in diverse fashion in the Thesmophoria, the 
Skirophoria, the Arretophoria.’ 

The Arretophoria or Arrephoria was apparently the Thesmo- 
phoria of the unmarried girl. Its particular ritual is fairly well 
known to us from the account of Pausanias. Immediately after 
his examination of the temple of Athene Polias on the Athenian 
Acropolis, Pausanias? comes to the temple of Pandrosos, ‘who 
alone of the sisters was blameless in regard to the trust com- 
mitted to them’:-he then adds, ‘what surprised me very much, 
but is not generally known, I will describe as it takes place. Two 

1 Clem. Al. Protr. u. 17, p. 14, 60 qv airiay év rots Gecpodoplos meyapifovres* 
(ueydpos (wvras, Lobeck) yolpous éuBddXovow. Tavrnvy THY uvOoroyiay ai yuvaiKes 


moikihws KaTa mo\wW éoprdfovcw Oecuodpipia, UKipopdpra, "AppyropPdpia moikitws T7Hy 
Pepeparrns Extpaywdovoar apmayny. 
2 1 27.3 


9—2 


132 The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


maidens dwell not far from the temple of Polias: the Athenians 
call them Arrephoroi, they are lodged for a time with the goddess, 
but when the festival comes round they perform the following 
ceremony by night. They put on their heads the things which 
the priestess of Athena gives them to carry, but what it is she 
gives is known neither to her who gives nor to them who carry. 
Now there is in the city an enclosure not far from the sanctuary of 
Aphrodite, called Aphrodite in the Gardens, and there is a natural 
underground descent through it. Down this way the maidens go. 
Below they leave their burdens, and getting something else which 
is wrapt up, they bring it back. These maidens are then dis- 
charged and others brought to the Acropolis in their stead’ 
From other sources some further details, for the most part 
insignificant, are known. The girls were of noble family, they 
were four in number and had to be between the ages of seven and 
eleven, and were chosen by the Archon Basileus. They wore 
white robes and gold ornaments. To two of their number was 
entrusted the task of beginning the weaving of the peplos of 
Athene. Special cakes called avactatoe were provided for them, 
but whether to eat or to carry as sacra does not appear. It is 
more important to note that the service of the Arrephoroi was 
not confined to Athene and Pandrosos?. There was an Errephoros 
(sic) to Demeter and Proserpine’, and there were Hersephoroi (sic) 
of ‘Earth with the title of Themis’ and of ‘ Eileithyia in Agrae*’ 
Probably any primitive woman goddess could have Arrephoria. 
Much is obscure in the account of Pausanias; we do not know 
what the precinct was to which the maidens went, nor where it 
was. It is possible that Pausanias confused the later sanctuary 
of Aphrodite (in the gardens) with the earlier sanctuary of the 
goddess close to the entrance of the Acropolis. One thing, how- 
ever, emerges clearly, the main gist of the ceremonial was the 


1 Trans. J. G. Frazer. Dr Frazer in his commentary on the passage, vol. 1. 
p. 344, enumerates the other sources respecting the Arrephoroi; see also Harrison 
and Verrall, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, pp. xxxii and 512. 

2 Dr Frazer draws my attention to the curiously analogous ritual practised at 
Lanuvium, in a grove near the temple of the Argive Hera, described by Aelian 
(Hist. An. xt. 16) and Propertius (iv. 8. 3 sqq.). Once a year sacred maidens 
descended with bandaged eyes into a serpent’s cave and offered it a barley cake. If 
the serpent ate of the cake the people rejoiced, taking it to show that the girls were 
pure maidens and that the year’s crops would be good: 

Si fuerint castae, redeunt in colla parentum ; 
Clamantque agricolae Fertilis annus erit. 
S5 OTe Agee NO. Os 4 C.I.A. 1., Nos. 318, 319. 


a 


4 IV | Arrephoria 133 


carrying of unknown sacra. In this respect we are justified in 
holding with Clement that the Arrephoria (held in Skirophorion, 
June—July) was a parallel to the Thesmophoria. 

It is possible, I think, to go a step further. A rite frequently 
throws light on the myth made to explain it. Occasionally the rite 
itself is elucidated by the myth to which it gave birth. The 
maidens who carried the sacred cista were too young to know its 
holy contents, but they might be curious, so a scare story was 
invented for their safeguarding, the story of the disobedient 
sisters who opened the chest, and in horror at the great snake they 
found there, threw themselves headlong from the Acropolis. The 
myth is prettily represented on an amphora in the British 





Bre. 113. 


Museum!, reproduced in fig. 13. The sacred chest stands on 
rude piled stones that represent the rock of the Acropolis, the 
child rises up with outstretched hand, Athene looks on in dismay 
and anger, and the bad sisters hurry away. Erichthonios is here 
a human child with two great snakes for guardians, but what the 
sisters really found, what the maidens really carried, was a snake* 
and symbols like a snake. Snake and child to the primitive mind 
are not far asunder; the Greek peasant of to-day has his child 


_ quickly baptized, for till baptized he may at any moment dis- 


, 
: 
t 
: 


appear in the form of a snake. The natural form for a human 
hero to assume is, as will later be seen, a snake. 


1 B. M. Cat. © 418, see Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. xxxii. 
2 dppyra iepa...minuata Spaxbvrwy kal avdpav oxnudrwy, see p. 122, note 2. 


> 


134 The Thesmophoria (CH. 


The little girl-Arrephoroi in ignorance, as became their age, 
carried the same sacra as the full-grown women in the Thesmo- 
phoria. The perfect seemliness and reverence of the rite is shown 
by the careful precautions taken. When goddesses began to take 
shape the sacra were regarded, not as mere magical charms, but as 
offerings as was meet to Ge, to Themis, to Aphrodite, to Eileithyia, 
but always the carrying was a reverent ‘mystery.’ 


The Skira or Skirophoria? presents more difficulties. It was 
specially closely associated with the Thesmophoria of which it 
may have formed part. The chorus in the Thesmophoriazusae of 
Aristophanes? says, ‘If any of us bear a good citizen to the 
state, a taxiarch or strategos, she ought to be rewarded by some 
honourable office, the presidency ought to be given her at the 
Stenia and the Skira and at any other of the feasts which we 
(women) celebrate. The scholiast remarks, ‘both were feasts of 
women; the Stenia took place before the two days of the Thesmo- 
phoria on the 7th of Pyanepsion, and the Skira, some say, are the 
sacred rites that took place on this feast (i.e. the Thesmophoria) 
to Demeter and Kore. But others say that sacrifice was made 
él Sxipm to Athene.” On the other hand in an inscription, 
usually a most trustworthy authority, the two ceremonies are 
noted as separate though apparently analogous. In the inscription 
in question’ which is of the 4th century B.c., certain regulations 
are enforced ‘when the feast of the Thesmophoria takes place, 
and at the Plerosia, and at the Kalamaia and the Skira, and if 
there is any other day on which the women congregate by ancestral 
usage.’ 

The ancients themselves had raised the question whether the 
Skira were sacred to Athene or to Demeter and Kore. This question 
is not really relevant to our enquiry; Athene, as will be seen 
later, when the ‘making of a goddess’ is discussed, is simply 
» A@nvaia Kopn, the copy, the maiden of Athens, and any festival 
of any Kore—any maiden—would early attach itself to her. 

More important is the question, What does the word oxipa 
mean? ‘Two solutions are offered. The scholiast on Aris- 


' For various views of the Skirophoria, see Robert, Hermes xx. 394; Rohde, 
Kleine Schriften, p. 371; A. Mommsen, Philolog. u. p. 123. 
* Ar. T'hesmoph. 834. 3 C.I.A. 11. p. 422, n. 573 b. 


Iv Skirophoria 135 


tophanes! says oxipov means the same as cxiadecov, umbrella, 
and the feast and the month took that name from the fact that 
at a festival of Demeter and Kore on the 12th of Skirophorion, 
the priest of Erechtheus carried a white umbrella. A white 
umbrella is a slender foundation for a festival, but the element 
of white points in the right direction. The scholiast on the 
Wasps of Aristophanes? commenting on oxipoy has a happier 
thought: he says a certain sort of white earth, like gypsum, is 
called oxippas, and Athene is called Yxcppds inasmuch as she is 
daubed with white, from a similarity in the name. 

The same notion of white earth appears in the notice of the 
Etymologicon Magnum on the month Skirophorion, ‘the name of a 
month among the Athenians; it is so called from the fact that in it 
Theseus carried cxipay by which is meant gypsum. For Theseus, 
coming from the Minotaur, made an Athene of gypsum, and 
carried it and as he made it in this month it is called Skiro- 
phorion.’ 

But, it will be asked, supposing it be granted that Skira 
means things made of gypsum and Skirophoria the carrying 
of such things, what, in the name of common sense, has this to 
do with a festival of women analogous to the Thesmophoria ? 
Dr A. Mommsen®, who first emphasized this etymology, proposes 
that the white earth was used as manure; this, though possible 
and ingenious, seems scarcely satisfactory. I would suggest 
another connection. The scholast on Lucian has told us that 
the surrogates deposited in the megara were shaped out of paste 
made of grain. Is it not possible that the Y«ipa were such 
surrogates made of gypsum alone or part gypsum, part flour-paste ? 
That such a mixture was manufactured for food we learn from 
Pliny‘. In discussing the preparation of alica from zea (spelt) he 
says, ‘astonishing statement, it is mixed with chalk.’ In the case 
of a coarse sort of zea from Africa, the mixture was made in the 
proportion of a quarter of gypsum to three of zea. If this 
suggestion be correct, the Skirophoria is simply a summer 
Thesmophoria. 

If the Skirophoria must, all said, remain conjectural, the gist 


1 Ar. Eccles. 18. 2 Ar. Vesp. 925. 
3 A. Mommsen, ‘ Die Attischen Skira-Gebriuche,’ Philolog. u. p. 123. 
2 Phin; N.EH. xvin..29. 2: 


136 The Thesmophoria 7 [ CH. 


of the Stenia is clear and was understood by the ancients them- 
selves. Photius remarks on Stenia—‘a festival at Athens in which 
the Anodos of Demeter is held to take place. At this festival, 
according to Euboulos, the women abuse each other by night.’ 
Hesychius! explains in like fashion and adds: otnwécar, ‘to 
use bad language,’ ‘to abuse.’ According to him they not only 
abused each other but ‘made scurrilous jests. Such abuse, we 
know from Aristophanes’, was a regular element of the licence of 
the Thesmophoria. The Gephyrismot, the jokes at the bridge, 
of the Eleusinian Mysteries, will occur to every one: similar in 
content is the stone-throwing, the Lithobolia of Damia and 
Auxesia, 

It is interesting to note that in the primitive festivals of the 
Romans, the same scurrility contests appear. At the ancient 
feast of the Nonae Capratinae, Plutarch® tells us, ‘the women 
are feasted in the fields in booths made of fig-tree branches, and 
the servant-maids run about and play; afterwards they come to 
blows and throw stones at one another.’ The servant-maids 
represent here as elsewhere a primitive subject population ; they 
live during the festival in booths as the women did at the Thesmo- 
phoria. How precisely this fight and this scurrility serve the end 
proposed, the promotion of fertility, is not wholly clear, but the 
throwing of stones, the beating and fighting, all look lke the 
expulsion of evil influences. The scurrilous and sometimes to our 
modern thinking unseemly gestures savour of sympathetic magic, 
an intent that comes out clearly in the festival of the Haloa, the 
discussion of which must be reserved to the end. 


We come next to the all-absorbing question, What is the 
derivation, the real root-meaning of the term Thesmophoria and 
the title Thesmophoros? The orthodox explanation of the Thesmo- 
phoria is that it was the festival of Demeter Thesmophoros, the 
law-carrier or law-giver. With Demeter, it is said, came in 
agriculture, settled life, marriage and the beginnings of civilized 
law. This is the view held by the scholiast on Theocritus*. In 
commenting on various sacred plants, which promoted chastity, 


1 Hesych. s.v. 2 Ar. Thesm. 533. 3 Plut. Vit. Rom. sub fin. 
4 Schol. ad Theoer. Id. tv. 25 ras voulwous BiBXous Kal lepas brép Tw Kopudwy 
avrwv dveridecav kal woavel Airavetcovocar amipxovro els ’ENevoiva. 


Meaning of Thesmophoria 137 





he adds, ‘It was a law among the Athenians that they should 
celebrate the Thesmophoria yearly, and the Thesmophoria is this: 
- women who are virgins and have lived a holy life, on the day of 
the feast, place certain customary and holy books on their heads, 
and as though to perform a liturgy they go to Eleusis,’ 

The scholiast gives himself away by the mention of Eleusis. 
He confuses the two festivals in instructive fashion, and clearly is 
reconstructing a ritual out of a cultus epithet. Happily we know 
from the other and better informed scholiast! that the women 
carried at the Thesmophoria not books but pigs. How then came 
the pigs and other sacra to be Thesmoi? Dr Frazer proposes a 
solution. He suggests that the sacra, including the pigs, were 
called @ecpoi, because they were ‘the things laid down.’ The 
women were called Thesmophoroi because they carried ‘the things 
laid down’; the goddess took her name from her ministrants. 

This interpretation is a great advance on the derivation 
from Thesmophoros, Law-giver. Thesmophoros is scarcely the 
natural form for law-giver, which in ordinary Greek appears as 
Thesmothetes. Moreover the form Thesmophoros must be con- 
nected with actual carrying and must also be connected with what 
we know was carried at the Thesmophoria, But Thesmoi in Greek 
did certainly mean Jaws, and Demeter Thesmophoros was in common 
parlance supposed to be Law-giver. What we want is a derivation 
that will combine both factors, the notion of law as well as the 
carrying of pigs. 

In the light of Dr Verrall’s new explanation of Anthesteria 
(p. 48) such a derivation may be found. If the Anthesteria be 
the festival of the charming up, the magical revocation of souls, 
may not the Thesmophoria be the festival of the carrying of the 
magical sacra? To regard the Oecpoi, whether they are pigs or 
laws, as simply ‘things laid down, deriving them from the root 
Ge, has always seemed to me somewhat frigid. The root Oeo is 
more vivid-and has the blood of religion, or rather magic, in its 
veins. Although it came, when man entered into orderly and 
civilized relations with his god, to mean ‘pray,’ in earlier days it 
carried a wider connotation, and meant, I think, to perform any 
kind of magical ceremonies. Is not @éoxeXos alive with magic ? 


1 See supra, p. 121 sq. 





138 The Thesmophoria [cH. 


THE CURSE AND THE Law. 


But what has law, sober law, to do with magic? To primitive 
man, it seems, everything. Magic is for cursing or for blessing, 
and in primitive codes it would seem there was no commandment 
without cursing. The curse, the apa, is of the essence of the law. 
The breaker of the law is laid under a ban. ‘ Honour thy father 
and thy mother’ was the first commandment ‘with promise.’ Law 
in fact began at a time long before the schism of Church and 
State, or even of Religion and Morality. There was then no such 
thing as ‘civil’ law. Nay more, it began in the dim days when 
religion itself had not yet emerged from magic, in the days when, 
without invoking the wrath of a righteous divinity, you could yet 
‘put a curse’ upon a man, bind him to do his duty by magic and 
spells. 

Primitive man, who thought he could constrain the earth to be 
_ fertile by burying in it fertile objects, by ‘sympathetic magic,’ was 
sure to think he could in like fashion compel his fellow. Curse 
tablets deposited in graves and sanctuaries have come to light in 
thousands ; but before man learnt to write his curse, to spell out 
the formulary cataéo, ‘I bind you down,’ he had a simpler and 
more certain plan. In a grave in Attica was found a little lead 
figure’ which tells its own tale. It is too ugly for needless 
reproduction, but it takes us into the very heart of ancient 
malignant magic. The head of the figure has been wrenched off, 
both arms are tightly swathed behind the back, and the legs in 
like fashion ; right through the centre of the body has been driven 
a great nail. Dr Wiinsch?, in publishing the figure, compares the 
story recorded of a certain St Theophilos* ‘who had his feet and 
hands bound by magic.’ The saint sought relief in vain, till he 
was told in a dream to go out fishing, and what the fishermen 
drew up would cure him of his malady. They let down the net 
and drew up a bronze figure, bound hand and foot and with a nail 


1 Sixteen similar figures with feet and hands tightly bound, and in some cases 
the arms pierced by nails, were recently found on the site of the ancient Palestrina, 
see Hgypt Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, p. 332. 

* KR. Wiinsch, ‘ Kine antike Rachepuppe,’ Philolog. ux1. 1902, p. 26. 

® Migne, Patrol. Gr. uxxxvit. 50 mept Ocoplrov Tod do muayelas cuvdebévros Tas 
xetpas Kal robs médas. 


© 


and the Law 139 





1] 


driven through the hand: they drew out the nail and the saint 
immediately recovered. 

The locus classicus on ancient magic and spells is of course the 
second Idyll of Theocritus', on Simaetha the magician. Part of 
her incantation may be quoted here because a poet’s insight has 
divined the strange fierce loveliness that lurks in rites of ignorance 
and fear, rites stark and desperate and non-moral as the passion 
that prompts them. 

Delphis has forsaken her, and in the moonlight by the sea 
Simaetha makes ready her magic gear: 


‘Lo! Now the barley smoulders in the flame. 
Thestylis, wretch! thy wits are woolgathering ! 

Am I a laughing-stock to thee, a Shame? 
Scatter the grain, I say, the while we sing, 
“The bones of Delphis I am scattering.” 

Bird*, magic Bird, draw the man home to me. 


Delphis sore troubled me. I, in my turn, 
This laurel against Delphis will I burn. 
It crackles loud, and sudden down doth die, 
So may the bones of Delphis liquefy. 
Wheel, magic Wheel, draw the man home to me. 


Next do I burn this wax, God helping me, 
So may the heart of Delphis melted be. 
This brazen wheel I whirl, so, as before 
Restless may he be whirled about my door. 
Bird, magic Bird, draw the man home to me. 


Next will I burn these husks. O Artemis, 
Hast power hell’s adamant to shatter down 
And every stubborn thing. Hark! Thestylis, 
Hecate’s hounds are baying up the town, 
The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong. 
* * * * * * * 


Lo, now the sea is still. The winds are still. 
The ache within my heart is never still.’ 


The incantations of Simaetha are of course a private rite to an 
individual end. That the practice of such rites was very frequent 
long before the decadent days of Theocritus is clear from the fact 
that Plato* in the Laws regards it as just as necessary that his 


1 Theocr. Id. 11. 18 ff. 

2 The bird iiyé, supposed to be the wry-neck Iynx torquilla, bound on a wheel 
was a frequent love-charm. It is like the Siren (p. 201) a bird-soul, an enchanted 
maiden with the power to lure souls. Such enchanters, half-human, half-bird, 
were also the Keledones, cf. Athen. vit. § 290 © al kara Tov abroy Tpémov Tats Leipjor 
Tos dkpowpuevous érolouv émiavOavouévous Twv Tpopay bia THY Hooviy adpavaiverBac. 
In metaphorical language Siren and Iynx are equivalents, ef. Xen. Mem. mm. 11. 18; 
and cf. Diog. Laert. v1. 2. 76 rova’rn Tis mpoony tiv Acoyévous Tots Novos. 

3 Plat. Legg. 933. 





140 | The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


ideal state should make enactments against the man who tries to 
slay or injure another by magic, as against him who actually does 
definite physical damage. His discussion of the two kinds of evil- 
doing is curious and instructive, both as indicating the prevalence 
of sorcery in his days, and as expressing the rather dubious attitude 
of his own mind towards such practices. ‘There are two kinds of 
poisoning in use among men, the nature of which forbids any clear 
distinction between them. There is the kind of which we have 
just now spoken, and which is the injury of one body by another 
in a natural and normal way, but the other kind injures by 
sorceries and incantations and magical bindings as they are called 
(xatadécecr), and this class induces the aggressors to injure others 
as much as is possible, and persuades the sufferers that they more 
than any other are liable to be damaged by this power of magic. 
Now it is not easy to know the whole truth about such matters, 
nor if one knows it is one likely to be able lightly to persuade 
others. When therefore men secretly suspect each other at the 
sight of, say, waxen images fixed either at their doors or at the 
crossways or at the tombs of their parents, it 1s no good telling 
them to make lght of such things because they know nothing 
certain about them.’ Evidently Plato is not quite certain as to 
whether there is something in witchcraft or not: a diviner or 
a prophet, he goes on to admit, may really know something about 
these secret arts. Anyhow, he is clear that they are deleterious 
and should be stamped out if possible, and accordingly, any one 
who injures another either by magical bindings (catadéceow) or 
by magical inductions (€7raywyais) or by incantations (é7@édais) or 
by another form of magic is to die. 

The scholiast' on the Idyll of Theocritus just quoted knows 
that one at least of the magical practices of Simaetha was also 
part of public ritual: 

‘The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong.’ 

Hecate is magically induced, yet her coming is feared. The 

clash of the bronze gong is apotropaic. ‘The scholiast says that 


1 Schol. ad Theocr. Id. 11. 10 rov yap xadxdv éerpjdov év rats éxelWeor Ts ceAHYNS Kal 
év Tois KaTotxouévois™ émedy évoulfero Kabapds elvat Kal dareNagTiKds THY mLagudTwr. 
dudmrep mpds macav adpoclwow Kal dmwoxdbapow aire éxpGvro, ws dynor Kal ’Amod- 
Abdwpos ev TH Tepl Oedv....pynolv ’AmodNdwpos “AOHvnoL Tov lepopavryy ris Képns — 
émikahouuevys, éemikpove TO KadovUmevoy HXELoV. Kal mapa Adkwot Baciéws adroPavérros 
eliOact kpovew NEBnra. The reading xarovyouévors is doubtful; see Mr A. B. Cook, 
J. H. S. 1902, p. 14. 





Iv The Curse and the Law 141 


‘they sound the bronze at eclipses of the moon...because it has 
power to purify and to drive off pollutions. Hence, as Apollodorus 
states in his treatise Concerning the Gods, bronze was used for all 
purposes of consecration and purgation.’ Apollodorus also stated 
that ‘at Athens, the Hierophant of her who had the title of Kore 
sounded what was called a gong. It was also the custom ‘to beat 
on a cauldron when the king of the Spartans died.’ All the cere- 
monies noted, relating to eclipses, to Kore and to the death of the 
Spartan king, are on public occasions, and all are apotropaic, 
directed against ghosts and sprites. Metal in early days, when 
it is a novelty, is apt to be magical. The din (xpotos) made 
by the women when they took down the sacra, whether it was a 
clapping of hands or of metal, is of the same order. The snakes are 
feared as hostile demons. These apotropaic rites are not practised 
against the Olympians, against Zeus and Apollo, but against sprites 
and ghosts and the divinities of the underworld, against Kore and 
Hecate. These underworld beings were at first dreaded and exor- 
cised, then as a gentler theology prevailed, men thought better 
of their gods, and ceased to exorcise them as demons, and erected 
them into a class of ‘spiritual beings who preside over curses.’ 
Pollux! has a brief notice of such divinities. He says ‘those who. 
resolve curses are called “ Protectors from evil spirits,’ Who-send- 
away, Averters, Loosers, Putters-to-flight; those who impose 
curses are called gods or goddesses of Vengeance, Gods of Appeal, 
Exactors. The many adjectival titles are but so many descriptive 
names for the ghost that cries for vengeance. 

The ‘curse that binds,’ the catadecpos, throws light on another 
_ element that went to the making of the ancient notion of sacrifice. 
The formula? in cursing was sometimes xatad@ ‘I bind down,’ but 
it was also sometimes trapadidwpe ‘I give over.’ The person cursed 
or bound down was in some sense a gift or sacrifice to the gods 
of cursing, the.underworld gods: the man stained by blood is 
‘consecrate’ (kaOvepmpévos) to the Erinyes. In the little sanctu- 
ary of Demeter at Cnidos* the curse takes even more religious 


1 Poll. On. v. 131 wept dauprdv wy Tov él TOV dpav, ot dé daiwoves, of wev NUovTes Tas 
dpas adetikakoe A€yovTat dom opm ato, amoTporrato, AVoLoL, Pvstot, ol dE KuUpovyTeEsS 
eee ioun, adirnpiwoets, mpooTpdmato, maapvaior. 

2 W. H. D. Rouse, Greek Votive Offerings, p. 339. Dr Rouse says that 
‘binding spells’ déuara ‘are still the terror of the Greek bridegroom.’ 
3 C. T. Newton, Discoveries at Cnidus and Halicarnassus. 


142 The Thesmophoria [cH. 


form. He or she dedicates (avepo?), or offers as a votive offering 
(dvariOnw, for avatiOnor), and finally we have the familiar dva@epa 
of St Paul. Here the services of cursing, the rites of magic and the 
underworld are half way to the service of ‘tendance,’ the service of 
the Olympians, and we begin to understand why, in later writers, 
the pharmakos and other ‘ purifications’ are spoken of as @votat. 
It is one of those shifts so unhappily common to the religious 
mind. Man wants to gain his own ends, to gratify his own malign 
passion, but he would like to kill two birds with one stone, and as 
the gods are made in his own image, the feat presents no great 
difficulty. Later as he grows gentler himself, he learns to pray 
only ‘good prayers,’ bonas preces’. 

The curse (apa) on its religious side developed into the vow? 
and the prayer (evy7), on its social side into the ordinance (@ecpos) 
and ultimately into the regular law (vdwos); hence the language of 
early legal formularies still maintains as necessary and integral the 
sanction of the curse. The formula is not ‘do this’ or ‘do not do 
that,’ but ‘cursed be he who does this, or does not do that.’ 

One instance may be selected, the inscription characteristically 
known as ‘the Dirae of Teos*.’ The whole is too long to be tran- 
scribed, a few lines must suffice. 

‘Whosoever maketh baneful drugs against the Teans, whether 
against individuals or the whole people : 


‘May he perish, both he and his offspring. 


‘Whosoever hinders corn from being brought into the land of 
the Teans, either by art or machination, whether by land or sea, 
and whosoever drives out what has been brought in: 


‘May he perish, both he and his offspring,’ 


So clause after clause comes the refrain of cursing, like the 


1 Cato, de agr. cult. 134. 3 bonas preces precor uti sies volens propitius mihi 
liberisque, ete. 

2 Suidas in explaining éfdpacda says 7d éxrehéoa Tas dpds, Todr’ Eort Tas evyas 
ds émlt rats i8picect Tav vaby elwPacr movetoPar. It is worth noting that in M.H.D. 
segen is not only as in modern German benedictio but also maledictio, see Osthoff, 
‘Allerhand Zauber etymologisch beleuchtet,’ Bezzenberger, Beitriige xxiv. p. 180. 

% Rohl, 7.G.d. 497. The whole subject of legal curses has been well discussed 
by Dr Ziebart, ‘Der Fluch im Griechischen Recht’ (Hermes xxx. p. 57) to whom 
I owe many references. Also by the same writer in his ‘Neue Attische Fluchtafeln’ 
(Nachrichten der K. Ges, d. Wiss. zu Gittingen, Phil.-Hist. Kl. 1889, pp. 105 and 
135), and by R. Wiinsch, ‘Neue Fluchtafeln’ (Rhein. Mus. 1900, 1. p. 62, 1. p. 282). 
Curse Inscriptions are collected in an Appendix to the Corpus Inscriptionum 
Atticarum, under the title Dejfixionum Tabulae. 


Iv] The Curse and the Law 143 


tolling of a bell, and at last as though they could not have their 
fill, comes the curse on the magistrate who fails to curse: 
‘Whosoever of them that hold office doth not make this cursing, 
what time he presides over the contest at the Anthesteria and the 
Herakleia and the Dia, let him be bound by an overcurse (év 77 
emrapyn éyeo@ar), and whoever either breaks the stelae on which the 
cursing is written, or cuts out the letters or makes them illegible : 


‘May he perish, both he and his offspring’ 


It is interesting to find here that the curses were recited at the 
Anthesteria, a festival of ghosts, and the Herakleia, an obvious hero 
festival, and at the Dia—this last surely a festival of imprecation like 
the Diasia. 

On the strength of these Dirae of Teos, recited at public and 
primitive festivals, it might not be rash to conjecture that at the 
Thesmophoria some form of @ecyot or binding spells was recited 
as well as carried. This conjecture becomes almost a certainty 
when we examine an important inscription’ found near Pergamos 
and dealing with the regulations for mourning in the city of 
Gambreion in Mysia. The mourning laws of the ancients bore 
harder on women than on men, a fact explicable not by the 
general lugubriousness of women, nor even by their supposed 
keener sense of convention, but by those early matriarchal con- 
ditions in which relationship naturally counted through the 
mother rather than the father. Women, the law in question 
enacts, are to wear dark garments; men if they ‘did not wish 
to do this’ might relax into white; the period of mourning is 
longer for women than for men. Next follows the important 
clause: ‘the official who superintends the affairs of women, who 
has been chosen by the people at the purifications that take 
place before the Thesmophoria, is to invoke blessings on the men 
who abide by the law and the women who obey the law that they 
may happily enjoy the goods they possess, but on the men who do 
not obey and the women who do not abide therein he is to invoke 
the contrary, and such women are to be accounted impious, and it 
is not lawful for them to make any sacrifice to the gods for the 
space of ten years, and the steward is to write up this law on two 


1 Dittenberger, Syll. Inscr. 879. 


144 The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


stelae and set them up, the one before the doors of the Thesmo- 
phorion, the other before the temple of Artemis Lochia.’ 

From the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes we learn almost 
nothing of the ritual of the Thesmophoria, save the fact that the 
feast was celebrated on the Pnyx?: but the fashion in which the 
woman-herald prays is worth noting; she begins by a real prayer’: 

‘T bid you pray to Gods and Goddesses 

That in Olympus and in Pytho dwell 

And Delos, and to all the other gods.’ 
But when she comes to what she really cares about, she breaks into 
the old habitual curse formularies : 


‘If any plots against the cause of Woman 

Or peace proposes to. Euripides 

Or to the Medes, or plots a tyranny, 

Or if a female slave in her master’s ear 

Tells tales, or male or female publican 

Scants the full measure of our legal pint— 
Curse him that he may miserably perish, 

He and his house,—but for the rest of you 
Pray that the gods may give you all good things.’ 

It is of interest to find that not only were official curses 
written up at the doors of a Thesmophorion, but, at Syracuse, an 
oath of special sanctity ‘the great oath’ was taken there. Plutarch® 
tells us that when Callippus was conspiring against his friend Dion, 
the wife and sister of Dion became suspicious. To allay their 
suspicions, Callippus offered to give any pledge of his sincerity 
they might desire. They demanded that he should take ‘the 
great oath’ (ou0ca Tov péyav Gpxov). ‘Now the great oath was 
after this wise. The man who gives this pledge has to go to 
the temenos of the Thesmophoroi, and after the performance of 
certain sacred ceremonies, he puts on him the purple robe of the 
goddess, and taking a burning torch he denies the charge on oath’ 
(drouvvor). It is clear that this ‘great oath’ was some form of 
imprecation on the oath-taker, who probably by putting on the 
robe, dedicated himself in case of perjury to the goddess of the 
underworld. That the goddess was Kore we know from the fact 
that Callippus eventually forswore himself in sacrilegious fashion 
by sacrificing his victim on the feast of the Koreia, ‘the feast of 
the goddess by whom he had sworn.’ The curse is the dedication 


1 Mon. and Myth. Anc. Athens, p. 104. 
2 Ar. Thesm, 3381. 3 Plut. Vit. Dion. 56. 


iW] The Haloa 145 


or devotion of others; the oath, like its more concrete form the 
ordeal, is the dedication of the curser himself. 

The connection between primitive law and agriculture seems 
to have been very close. The name of the earliest laws recorded— 
they are rather precepts than in our sense laws—the ‘Ploughman’s 
Curses’ speaks for itself. Some of these Ploughman’s Curses are 
recorded. We are told by one of the ‘ Writers of Proverbs?’ that 
‘the Bouzyges at Athens, who performs the sacred ploughing, 
utters many other curses and also curses those who do not share 
water and fire as a means of subsistence and those who do not 
show the way to those who have lost it. Other similar precepts, 
no doubt sanctioned by similar curses, have come down to us 
under the name of the Thrice-Plougher T'riptolemos?, the first 
lawgiver of the Athenians. He bade men ‘honour their wee’ 
rejoice the gods with the fruits of the earth and not injure 
animals.’ Perhaps these were to the Greeks the first command- 
ments ‘with promise.’ 

Such are the primitive precepts that grow up in a com- 
munity which agriculture has begun to bind together with the 
ties of civilized life. In the days before curses were graven in 
stone and perhaps for long after, it was well that when the 
people were gathered together for sowing or for harvest, these 
salutary curses should be recited. Amid the decay of so much 
that is robust and primitive, it is pleasant to remember that in the 
Commination Service of our own Anglican Church with its string 
of holy curses annually recited 


‘They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.’ 


THE HALOA. 


V 

The consideration of the Haloa has been purposely reserved to 
the end for this reason. The rites of the Thesmophoria, Skirophoria 
and Arrephoria are carried on by women only, and when they come 
to be associated with divinities at all, they are regarded as ‘sacred 
to’ Demeter and Kore or to analogous women goddesses Ge, 
1 Paroimiogr. 1. 388 6 yap Bougiyns "AOnvnow 6 Tov iepdy dporov émiTe\w@v adda TE 
ToANG aparar Kal Tots wy KoLWwvovor KaTa Tov Biov Vdaros 7 Tupds 7) wy Uropalvovew 


Oddy mavwpévors. 
2 Porph. de Abst. tv. 22. 


H. 10 


146 The Thesmophoria 






Aphrodite, Eileithyia and Athene. Moreover the sacra ¢ ca 
are cereal cakes and nephalia: but the rites of the Haloa, thougt h 
indeed mainly conducted by women, and sacred in part to 
Demeter, contain a new element, that of wine, and are therefore in 
mythological days regarded as ‘sacred to’ not only Demeter but 
Dionysos. 

; On this nae an important scholion? to Lucian is explicit, 
The Haloa is ‘a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter 
and Kore and Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of the vines 
and the tasting of the wine made from them.’ Eustathius? states 
the same fact. ‘There is celebrated, according to Pausanias, a 
east of Demeter and Dionysos called the Haloa. He adds, in 
explaining the name, that at it they were wont to carry first-fruits 
from Athens to Eleusis and to sport upon the threshing-floors, and 
that at the feast there was a procession of Poseidon. At Eleusis, 
Poseidon was not yet specialized into a sea-god only; he was 
Phytalmios, god of plants, and as such, it will be later seen (p. 427), 
his worship was easily affiliated to that of Dionysos. 

The affiliation of the worship of the corn-goddess to that of 
the wine-god is of the first importance. The coming of Dionysos 
brought a new spiritual impulse to the religion of Greece, an 
impulse the nature of which will later be considered in full, and 
it was to this new impulse that the Eleusinian mysteries owed, 
apart from political considerations which do not concern us, their 
ultimate dominance. Of these mysteries the Haloa is, I think, 
the primitive prototype. 

As to the primitive gist of the Haloa, there is no shadow of 
doubt : the name speaks for itself. Harpocration* rightly explains 
the festival, ‘the Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, 
from the fact that people hold sports at the threshing-floors, and 
he says it is celebrated in the month Poseideon.’ The sports held 
were of course incidental to the business of threshing, but it was 
these sports that constituted the actual festival. To this day the 


* Schol. ad Luc. Dial. Meretr. vu. 4 “Eoprh "AOjvance Mug Tipta meptexovea 
Anuntpos kal Képns kai Avovicov ért TH Toy TOv auméwy Kal TH yevoe Tov drro- 
Keywévou Hdn olvov ywoueva mapa ’APnvalots. 

2 Eustath. ad Il. rx. 530, 772 ’Ioréov 6€ bre érl cvyKomdy Kapa éd’ 7 Kal Ta 
Oadviowa EOUeTO EopTh Hyero Atjupraos kal Avovicov kara Iavoaviav, dX@a ckadoumévyn did 
To Tais dmapxats kal uddrora ev ’AOnvats awd Tis aw TéTE KaTaxpacba Pépovras els 
*Edevoiva 7 érel Kaba kal “Ounpos éudalver év ddwow eravov kara Thy éopriv év 7 Kal 
Iloce:da@vos Hv moun. 

3 Harp. s.v. ‘AX@a. 


Iv | The Haloa 147 


great round threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is 
the scene of the harvest festival. .Near it a booth (oxnvy) is to 
this day erected, and in it the performers rest and eat and drink 
in the intervals of their pantomimic dancing. 

The Haloa was celebrated in the month Poseideon (December— 
January), a fact as surprising as it is ultimately significant. What 
has a threshing festival to do with mid-winter, when all the grain 
should be safely housed in the barns? Normally, now as in ancient 
days, the threshing follows as soon as may be after the cutting of 
the corn; it is threshed and afterwards winnowed in the open 
threshing-floor, and mid-winter is no time even in Greece for 
an open-air operation. 

The answer is simple. The shift of date is due to Dionysos. 
The rival festivals of Dionysos were in mid-winter. He possessed 
himself of the festivals of Demeter, took over her threshing-floor 
and compelled the anomaly of a winter threshing festival. The 
latest time that a real threshing festival could take place is 
Pyanepsion, but by Poseideon it is just possible to have an early 
Pithoigia and to revel with Dionysos. There could be no clearer 
witness to the might of the incoming god. 

As to the nature of the Haloa we learn two important facts 
from Demosthenes. It was a festival in which the priestess, not 
the Hierophant, presented the offerings, a festival under the 
presidency .of women; and these offerings were bloodless, no 
animal victim (/epezov) was allowed. Demosthenes! records how 
a Hierophant, Archias by name, ‘ was cursed because at the Haloa 
he offered on the eschara in the court of Eleusis burnt sacrifice of 
an animal victim brought by the courtezan Sinope.’ His condem- 
nation was on a double count, ‘it was not lawful on that day to 
sacrifice an animal victim, and the sacrifice was not his business 
but that of the priestess.’ The epheboi? offered bulls at Eleusis, 
and, it would appear, engaged in some sort of ‘ bull fight?, but this 


Pa ee te Speed Ons af 
1 Dem. 59. 116 karnpydy atrod (Tod iepopavrov) kal bre Duvwry 77H ETalpa Adwors 
éml THS €oxdpas THs €v TH avAy HXevoive rpocayovcy lepetov Ovcerev, ov vouluou ovTos ev 
TAVTH TH NuEpa Lepeta Over ovdE Exeivou ovans Tis Oucias GAG Tips iepelas. 
2 C.I.A, m. 1, n. 471 Fpavro 6é Kal rods Bods rolvs] ev "HNevotve ry Ovoia Kal Tots 
mponpoctos Kal Tos év tots ddXors iepots kal yupvacios. Cf. Dittenberger, De Epheb. 


3 The nature of the contest is not clear. Artemidorus (1. 8) says: ravpos év 
*Iwvia matées Edeciwy aywvifovrat kal év "Artixy mapa Tats Beats ev ’Hevotve ‘ Kovpou 
*AOnvator mepiTeANomévwy éeviavrwy.’ See Lobeck, Agl. p. 206. 


10— 


bo 


148 The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


must have been in honour either of Dionysos or of Poseidon who 
preceded him: the vehicle of both these divinities was the bull. 
It was the boast of the archon at the Haloa that Demeter had 
given to men ‘gentle foods.’ 

Our fullest details of the Haloa, as of the Thesmophoria, come 
to us from the newly discovered scholia on Lucian’. From the 
scholiast’s account it is clear that by his day the festival was 
regarded as connected with Dionysos as much as, or possibly more 
than, with Demeter. He definitely states that it was instituted 
in memory of the death of Ikarios after his introduction of the 
vine into Attica. The women he says celebrated it alone, in order 
that they might have perfect freedom of speech. The sacred 
symbols of both sexes were handled, the priestesses secretly 
whispered into the ears of the women present words that might 
not be uttered aloud, and the women themselves uttered all 
mannér of what seemed to him unseemly quips and jests. The 
sacra handled are, it is clear, the same as those of the Thesmo- 
phoria: that their use and exhibition were carefully guarded is also 
clear from the exclusion of the other sex. The climax of the 
festival, it appears, was a great banquet. ‘Much wine was set 
out and the tables were full of all the foods that are yielded by 
land and sea, save only those that are prohibited in the mysteries, 
I mean the pomegranate and the apple and domestic fowls, and 
eggs and red sea-mullet and black-tail and crayfish and shark. 
The archons prepare the tables and leave the women inside and 


1 Lue. Dial. Meretr. vit. 4 ‘ THMEPOY “AN\@d éort, Th 6€ col dédwxer eis Thy €oprny ;” 
schol. ad loc. ‘Eopri "AOnynot MuoT pla mepiexouse Ajyntpos Kat Kéopns kal Atovtioou 
éml TH TOLD Twv aumé\wv Kal TH yevoet TOD amoKermévou HOn olvov ywomeva mapa 
"AOnvalos év ols mporiferac (d. Subject fehlt im Cod.: zu erginzen ist mréuuara?) 
Twa aicxivats dvdpeios (Sic) éovxdra, wept wy SinyoivTar ws mpds civOnua Tis TaY 
avOpwmrwyv oropas yiwopévwy bre 6 Atovyugos Sods Tov olvoy.... After recounting the death 
of Ikarios the scholiast continues, dréurnua 6é Tod rabous ] ToLa’Tyn EopTH. ev TavTH 
kal TeNeTH Tes elodyerac yuvaikwy év "EXevotn, Kat macdcal NéyovTac wo\Nal Kal oKOMmaTA, 
povat 6€ yuvaixes elomopevdmevar em’ ddelas Exovow a BovAovrar Neyer. Kal OH Ta 
alox.cra a\AnAats Névyouot Tore, ai dé léperac NAPpa mpooiovoae Tals yuvasi KreYryaulas 
mpos TO oUs ws amoppynrdv TL cUUBovAeVovTwW. dvadwvoicr dé mpds dd\dAjAas Taca al 
yuvaixes aloxpa kat doeuva, Baordfovoa eldn cwudrwy (so die Hs.: der Sinn erfordert 
OXNMATWY genitalium) dm per (ampemet die Hs.) dv dpeid Te Kal yuvatkeia. évravda olvds 
TE monds mpoKkeirat Kal Tpdme fat TavTav THY THS vis kal Jardoons yémovoa Bpwuarwr, 
aha Tuv aTreipnuevwy ev TH MUOTLK@, pods Pynul Kal u#Aov Kai dpvidwy Karorxidiwy, Kal 
wav, kal Oadacolas rplydys épvOivou (épcOvvou die Hs.), weNavovpov, xwpdGov (? KapaBou), 
yadatod (yadeod?). maparidéacr dé ras Tparéfas ol dpyovres Kal évdov karaNurévtes Tais 
yuvasly, avroi xwplfovrac &&w diapévovTes, Emideckvipmevoe Tots émidnuovor Maat Tas 
nuepous Tpopas mapa avrav evpeOjvac Kal maou KowwrnOjvae Tots dvOpwros rap’ av’raov. 
mpboKerrar 6é Tats Tpaméfars Kal Ex mAakodvTos KaTecKkevagnéva duporépwy yevwr aldoia. 
adwa dé €xAnOn dia Tov Kapmwov Tod Avovicou* ddwal yap al Tw duréXwy puretat. 


Iv | The Haloa 149 


themselves withdraw and remain outside, making a public state- 
ment to the visitors present that the “ gentle foods” were discovered 
by them (i.e. the people of Eleusis) and by them shared with the 
rest of mankind. And there are upon the tables cakes shaped 
like the symbols of sex. And the name Haloa is given to the feast 
on account of the fruit of Dionysos—for the growths of the vine 
are called Aloat.’ ? 

The materials of the women’s feast are interesting. The diet 
prescribed is of cereals and of fish and possibly fowl, but clearly 
not of flesh. As such it is characteristic of the old Pelasgian 
population before the coming of the flesh-eating Achaeans. More- 
over—a second point of interest—-it is hedged in with all manner 
of primitive taboos. The precise reason of the taboo on pome- 
granates, red mullet and the lke, is lost beyond recall, but some 
of the particular taboos are important because they are strictly 
paralleled in the Eleusinian mysteries. That the pomegranate 
was ‘taboo’ at the Eleusinian mysteries is clear from the aetio- 
logical myth in the Homeric hymn to Demeter’. Hades consents 
to let Persephone return to the upper air. 

‘So spake he, and Persephone the prudent up did rise 

Glad in her heart and swift to go. But he in crafty wise 

Looked round and gave her stealthily a sweet pomegranate seed 

To eat, that not for all her days with Her of sable-weed, 

Demeter, should she tarry, pre 
The pomegranate was dead men’s food, and once tasted drew 
Persephone back to the shades. Demeter admits it; she says? to 
Persephone : 


‘If thou hast tasted food below, thou canst not tarry here, 
Below the hollow earth must dwell the third part of the year.’ 
Porphyry? in his treatise on Abstinence from Animal Food, notes 
the reason and the rigour of the Eleusinian taboos. Demeter, he 
says, is a goddess of the lower world and they consecrate the cock 
to her. The word he uses, agiépwoayr, really means put under a 
taboo. We are apt to associate the cock with daylight and his 
early morning crowing, but the Greeks for some reason regarded 
the bird as chthonic. It is a cock, Socrates remembers, that he 
owes to Asklepios, and Asklepios, it will be seen when we come 


1 Hom. Hym. ad Cer. 370. 2 -v. 399. 
° Porphyr. de Abst. tv. 16. 


150 The Thesmophoria [ CH. 


to the subject of hero-worship, was but a half-deified hero. The 
cock was laid under a taboo, reserved, and then came to be con- 
sidered as a sacrifice. Porphyry goes on ‘It is because of this that 
the mystics abstain from barndoor fowls. And at Eleusis public 
proclamation is made that men must abstain from barndoor 
fowls, from fish and from beans, and from the pomegranate and 
from apples, and to touch these defiles as much as to touch a 
woman in child-birth or a dead body.’ The Eleusinian Mysteries 
were in their enactments the very counterpart of the Haloa. 


THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. 


The Eleusinian Mysteries! are usually treated as if they were 
a thing by themselves, a ceremony so significant, so august, as to 
stand apart from the rest of Greek Ritual. If my view be correct, 
they are primarily but the Eleusinian Haloa: all their ultimate 
splendour and spiritual as well as social prestige are due to two 
things, first the fact that Athens for political purposes made 
them her own, second that at some date we cannot exactly fix, 
they became affiliated to the mysteries of Dionysos. To Athens 
the mysteries owe their external magnificence, to Dionysos and 
Orpheus their deep inward content. The external magnificence, 
being non-religious, does not concern us; the deep inward content, 
the hope of immortality and the like are matters of cardinal 
import, but must stand over till a later chapter, after the incoming 
of Dionysos has been discussed. For the present what concerns us 
is, setting aside all vague statements and opinions as to the 
meaning and spiritual influence attributed by various authors, 
ancient and modern, to the mysteries, to examine the actual 
ritual facts of which evidence remains. 

Mysteries were by no means confined to the religion of 
Demeter and Kore. There were mysteries of Hermes, of Iasion, 
of Ino, of Archemoros, of Agraulos, of Hecate. In general mysteries 


1 The sources for the Eleusinian Mysteries are collected in Lobeck’s Aglaophamus. 
Reference to inscriptions discovered since Lobeck’s days will be found in Daremberg 
and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des Antiquités, s.v. The best general account in English 
is that by Prof. Ramsay in the Wncyclopaedia Britannica, in French two articles 
reprinted from the Mémoires de VAcadémie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 
vol. xxxv. 2nd part 1895, and vol. xxxvi. 1900, entitled ‘Recherches sur Vorigine et 
la nature des Mystéres d’Eleusis,’ and ‘Les Grands Mystéres d’Eleusis, Personnel, 
Cérémonies.’ 


Iv] | The Eleusinian Mysteries — 151 


seem to occur more usually in relation to the cult of women 
divinities’, of heroines and earth-goddesses: from the worship of 
the Olympians in Homer they are markedly absent. In general, 
by a mystery is meant a rite in which certain sacra are exhibited, 
which cannot be safely seen by the worshipper till he has under- 
gone certain purifications. 

The date of the mysteries at Eleusis is fortunately certain. 
The ceremonies began on the 13th of Boedromion, i.e. about the 
end of September, an appropriate date for any harvest festival 
which was to include the later fruits and notably the grape. Our 
evidence for this date is an imperial Roman inscription?, but this 
inscription expressly states that its enactments are ‘according to 
ancient usage. ‘The people has decided to order the Kosmeter 
of the Epheboi in accordance with ancient usage to send them 
to Eleusis on the 13th day of Boedromion, in their customary 
dress, for the procession that accompanies the sacra, in order 
that on the 14th they may escort them to the Eleusinion which 
is at the foot of the Acropolis. Also to order the Kosmeter of the 
Epheboi to conduct them on the 19th to Eleusis in the same dress, F 
escorting the sacra.’ The inscription is of great importance, as 
it is clear evidence that sacra were part of the regular ritual. 
What precisely these sacra were we do not know; presumably they 
were objects like those in use at the Thesmophoria. The going 
to and fro from Eleusis to Athens is purely political. The sacra 
were really resident at Eleusis, but Athens liked to think she 
brought them there. The Epheboi escorted the sacra, but, as 
was fitting, they were really in charge of, and actually carried 
by, priestesses’. 

On the 15th of Boedromion took place the ayupyds or” 
assembling of the candidates for initiation, and the proclama- 
tion by the Hierophant in the Stoa Poikile interdicting those 
whose hands were defiled and those whose lips spoke unintelligible 
words‘. Some such interdiction, some ‘fencing of the tables, took 


1 The rites at Eleusis were probably at first confined to women. Dionysios 
of Halicarnassos (Ant. Rom. 1. 331) says in speaking of the cult of Demeter in 
Arcadia, idptcavto dé Kal Ajunrpos iepoy xal Tas Ovolas airy dia yuvarkav Kai vnpadious 
€Ovoav ws" EdXAyor vowos wy ovdev 6 Kal’ Huds AANazE xpovos. 

SNC TSA. rime (5. 

3 Inser. A. Mitth. 1894 p. 163 as dv ra iepa Pépwour ai iéperar dogpadéorara. 

_ * The exact formulary is preserved by Theon of Smyrna, p. 22, 76 xjpuyua ToiTo 
Knpttreta ‘doris Tas xelpas mi KaOapds...d0T1s pwv7v dctveros.” Some authorities 





152 The Thesmophoria e Fase: ” 


place in all probability before all mysteries. It is this prorrhesis 7 
of course that is parodied by Aristophanes in the Frogs', who 
actually dares to put his burlesque into the mouth of the 
Hierophant himself. 

The 16th of Boedromion saw the accomplishment of a rite of 
cardinal importance. The day was called in popular parlance 
‘arabe pvotar, ‘To the sea ye mystics, from the cry that 
heralded the act of purification. Hesychius* in commenting on 
the expression says ‘a certain day of the Mysteries at Athens.’ 
Polyaenus? is precise as to the date. He says ‘Chabrias won the 
sea-fight at Naxos on the 16th of Boedromion. He had felt that 
this was a good day for a battle, because it was one of the days of 
“the Great Mysteries. The same thing happened with Themistocles 
against the Persians at Salamis. But Themistocles and his troops 
had the “Jacchos” for their call, while Chabrias and his troops had 
“To the sea ye mystics.”’ The victory of Chabrias was won, as we 
* know from Plutarch‘, at the full moon, and at the full moon the 
Mysteries were celebrated. 

The procession to the sea was called by the somewhat singular 
name édaovs, ‘driving’ or ‘banishing®, and the word is instructive.. 
The procession was not a mere procession, it was a driving out, a 
banishing. This primary sense seems to lurk in the Greek word 
moun ®, which in primitive days seems to have mainly meant a 
conducting out, a sending away of evil. The bathing in the sea 
was a purification, a conducting out, a banishing of evil, and each 
man took with him his own pharmakos, a young pig. The édaauvs, 
the driving, may haye been literally the driving of the pig, which, 
as the goal was some 6 miles distant, must have been a lengthy 
and troublesome business. Arrived at the sea, each man bathed 
with his pig—the pig of purification was itself purified. When in 
the days of Phocion’ the Athenians were compelled to receive a 


think that @wyhy dovveros means speaking an unknown, barbarous tongue, others 
that it meant having some impediment of speech that prevented the due utterance 
of the sacred formularies. I think the former more probable. 

1 Ar. Ran. 354. 

2 Hesych. s.v. 3 Polyaen. Strat. mm. 11. 

4 Plut. de glor. Ath. vit. 

5 C.L.A. 1. 385 d, 1. 20 érewedjOnoav dé cal ris adade EXdoews. 

6 Mr R. A. Neil suggested that the same root and idea may lurk in the 
unexplained pontifex, i.e. maker of roumrai. The connection with bridges is late 
and fanciful. 

7 Plut. Vit. Phoc. xxvut. 


| Iv] The Eleusinian Mysteries 153 


Macedonian garrison, terrible portents appeared. When the ribbons 
with which the mystic beds were wound came to be dyed, instead 
of taking a purple colour they came out of a sallow death-like 
hue, which was the more remarkable as when it was the ribbons 
belonging to private persons that were dyed, they came out all 
right. And more portentous still—‘ when a mystic was bathing 
his pig in the harbour called Kantharos, a sea-monster ate off the 
lower part of his body, by which the god made clear beforehand 
that they would be deprived of the lower parts of the city that lay 
near the sea, but keep the upper portion.’ 

The pig of purification was a ritual element, so important 
that when Eleusis was permitted 
(B.c. 350—327) to issue her au- it 
tonomous coinage’ it is the pig / yk 
that she chooses as the sign and = { fey 
symbol of her mysteries. The \ (Yip 
bronze coin in fig. 14 shows the b= 
pig standing on the torch: in the Fie. 14, 
exergue an ivy spray. The pig 
was the cheapest and commonest of sacrificial animals, one that 
each and every citizen could afford. Socrates in the Republic* 
says ‘if people are to hear shameful and monstrous stories about 
the gods it should be only rarely and to a select few in a mystery, 
and they should have to sacrifice not a (mere) pig but some huge 
and unprocurable victim.’ 

Purification, it is clear, was an essential feature of the 
mysteries) \and this brings us to the consideration of the meaning 
of the word mystery. The usual derivation of the word is 
from pvo, 2 close the apertures whether of eyes or mouth. The 
mystes, it is supposed, is the person vowed to secrecy who has 
not seen and will not speak of the things revealed. As such he is 
distinguished from the epoptes who has seen, but equally may not 
speak; the two words indicate successive grades of initiation. 
It will later be seen (p. 480) that in the Orphic Mysteries the 
word mystes is applied, without any reference to seeing or not 
seeing, to a person who has fulfilled the rite of eating the raw 
flesh of a bull. It will also be seen that in Crete, which is 





1 Head, Hist. Num. p. 328: on the reverse is Triptolemos in his winged car. 
2 Plat. Rep. 1. 378 a. 


a ad 





154 The Thesmophoria 


probably the home of the mysteries, the mysteries were open to 
all, they were not mysterious. The derivation of mystery from 
tv, though possible, is not satisfactory. I would suggest another 
and a simple origin. 

The ancients themselves were not quite comfortable about the 
connection with num. They knew and felt that mystery, secrecy, 
was not the main gist of ‘a mystery’: the essence of it all primarily 
“was purification in order that you might safely eat and handle 
certain sacra. There was no revelation, no secret to be kept, only 
a mysterious taboo to be prepared for and finally overcome. It 
might be a taboo on eating first-fruits, it might be a taboo on 
handling magical sacra. In the Thesmophoria, the women fast 
before they touch the sacra; in the Eleusinian mysteries you 
sacrifice a pig before you offer and partake of the first-fruits. 
The gist of it all is purification. Clement? says significantly, ‘ Not 
unreasonably among the Greeks in their mysteries do ceremonies 
of purification hold the initial place, as with barbarians the bath.’ 
Merely as an insulting conjecture Clement? in his irresponsible 
abusive fashion throws out what I believe to be the real origin 
of the word mystery. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘that these orgies and 
mysteries of yours ought to be derived, the one from—the. wrath 
(opy7) of Demeter against Zeus, the other from the ‘pollution 
(uvoos) relating to Dionysos. Of course Clement is formally 
quite incorrect, but he hits on what seems a possible origin of 
the word mystery, that it is the doing of what relates to a pvoos, 
a pollution, it is primarily a ceremony of purification. Lydus’ 
makes the same suggestion, ‘ Mysteries, he says, ‘are from the 
separating away of a pollution (uvcos) as equivalent to sanctifi- 
cation.’ 

The bathing with the pig was not the only rite of puri- 
fication in the mysteries, though it is the one of which we 
have most definite detail. From the aetiology’ of the Homeric 

1 Clem. Al. Strom. v. 689 odk daecxérws Kal Tov wvornplwy Tov map’ “ENAnow dpyer 
Mev Kabdpoa Kabdmep Kal év Tots BapBapots TO NouTpor. 

2 Clem. Al. Protr, 11. wvorhpia...d7d Tod cumBeBnxdros rept rov Acévurov jtoous. 

3 Lyd. de mens. 1v. 38 Muornpia aro ris orepjoews Tod wiaoous dvtl Tis ayoctvns. 
In form ptorns might come from piw (ef. duvori), but Mr Gilbert Murray draws my 
attention to some uses of uvorhpiov which point rather to uioos, e.g. Eur. Suppl. 
470 Nioavra ceuva oreumarwv prorhpa and Hl. 87 éx Aeod uwvornplwy. 

4 The aetiology of the Hymn and the various ceremonies that gave rise to it are 


well explained by Mr F. B. Jevons, Introd. to History of Religion, Appendix to 
Chapter XXIV. 


Iv] The Tokens 155 


Hymn to Demeter, we may conjecture that there were, at least 
for children, rites of purification by passing through fire, and 
ceremonies of a mock fight or stone-throwing (AOo0Boréa, 
Badrrntvs). All have the same intent and need not here be 
examined in detail. 

On the night of the 19—20th! the procession of purified 
mystics, carrying with them the image of Iacchos, left Athens 
for Eleusis, and after that we have no evidence of the exact 
order of the various rites of initiation. The exact order is indeed 
of little importance. Instead we have recorded what is of im- 
measurably more importance, the precise formularies in which 
the mystics avowed the rites in which they had taken part, rites 
which we are bound to suppose constituted the primitive ceremony 
of initiation. 4 

Before these are examined it is necessary to state definitely 
what already has been implied, ie. the fact that at the mysteries 
there was an offering of first-fruits; the mysteries were in fact the 
Thargelia of Eleusis. An inscription® of the 5th century B.c. 
found at Eleusis is our best evidence. ‘Let the Hierophant and 
the Torch-bearer command that at the mysteries the Hellenes 
should offer first-fruits of their crops in accordance with ancestral 
usage...... To those who do these things there shall be many good 
things, both good and abundant crops, whoever of them do not 
injure the Athenians, nor the city of Athens, nor the two 
goddesses. The order of precedence is amusing and character- 
istic. Here we have indeed a commandment with promise. 

The ‘token’ or formulary by which the mystic made confession 
is preserved for us by Clement ® as follows: ‘J fasted, I drank the 
kykeon, I took from the chest, (having tasted?) I put back into the 
basket and from the basket into the chest. ‘The statement involves, 
in the main, two acts besides the preliminary fast, i.e. the drinking 
of the kykeon and the handling of certain unnamed sacra. 


1 I omit altogether the ceremonies of the 17th—18th, the Hpidauria, as 
they were manifestly a later accretion ; the worship of the Epidaurian Asklepios 
was formally inaugurated at Athens (see p. 344) in 421 B.c. 

2 Dittenberger, Syllog. Inscript. 13. 

3 Clem. Al. Protr. 1. 18 gore 76 obvOnua ’Edevowlwy ’Evjorevoa, émiov Tov KuKeGva, 
ZaBov éx xiorns, épyacdpevos (? éyyevodmevos) amefeuny eis Kddabov Kal €k Kadafou eis 
kiornv. Since the above was written, Dr Dieterich (Eine Mithras-Liturgie p. 125) 
has shown good reason for supposing that ¢pyacduevos is a euphemism for rites 
analogous to the iepds yduos: see p. 535. 







156 The Thesmophoria ee 
ey >, 
. . . . >i" ie Ne 
It is significant of the whole attitude of Greek religion that. 


the confession is not a confession of dogma or even faith, but an 
avowal of ritual acts performed. This is the measure of the gulf 
between ancient and modern. The Greeks in their greater wisdom 
saw that uniformity in ritual was desirable and possible ; they left 
a man practically free in the only sphere where freedom is of real 
importance, i.e. in the matter of thought. So long as you fasted, 
drank the kykeon, handled the sacra, no one asked what were your 
opinions or your sentiments in the performance of those acts; 
you were left to find in every sacrament the only thing you could 
find—what you brought. Our own creed is mainly a Credo, an 
utterance of dogma, formulated by the few for the many, but it 
has traces of the more ancient conception of Conjfiteor, the avowal 
of ritual acts performed. Credo in unam sanctam catholicam et 
apostolicam ecclesiam is immediately followed by Confiteor unum 
baptismum, though the instinct of dogma surges up again in the 
final words in remissionem peccatorum.. 

The preliminary fast before the eating of sacred things is 
common to most primitive peoples; it is the simplest negative 
form of purification: among the more logical savages it 1s often 
accompanied by the taking of a powerful emetic. The kykeon 
requires a word of explanation. The first-fruits at Eleusis were 
presented in the form of a pelanos’. The nature of a pelanos has 
already been discussed, and the fact noted that the word pelanos 
was used only of the half-fluid mixture offered to the gods. Its 
equivalent for mortals was called alphita or sometimes kykeon. 
Eustathius in commenting on the drink prepared by Hekamede 
for Nestor, a drink made of barley and cheese and pale honey and 
onion and Pramnian wine, says that the word kykeon meant some- 
thing between meat and drink, but inclining to be like a sort of 
soup that you could sup. Such a drink it was that in the Homeric 
Hymn Metaneira prepared for Demeter, only with no wine, for 
Demeter, as an underworld goddess ‘might not drink red wine’: and 
such a wineless drink, made in all probability from the pelanos 
and only differing from it in name, was set before the mystae. 

Some ceremony like the drinking of the kykeon is represented 
in the vase-painting* in fig. 15. Two worshippers, a man and 


1 C.I.A. vol. tv. p. 203, ll. 68 and 72. 
* Annali dell’ Inst. 1865, Tav. @ agg. F. Naples, Heydemann, Cat. 3358. 


Iv] i The Sacra 157 


a woman, are seated side by side; before them a table piled with 
food, beneath it a basket of loaves. They are inscribed Mystue 
(Mvora). A priest holding in the left hand twigs and standing 
by a little shrine, offers to them a cylix containing some form of 
drink. The presence of the little shrine has made some commen- 
tators see in the priest an itinerant quack priest (ayvprys), but it 





is quite possible that shrines of this kind contaiming sacra were 
carried at the Eleusinian mysteries. Anyhow the scene depicted 
is analogous. 

Of the actual sacra which the initiated had to take from the 
chest, place in the basket, and replace in the chest, we know 
nothing. The sacra of the Thesmophoria are known, those of the 
Dionysiac mysteries were of trivial character, a ball, a mirror, a 
cone, and the like: there is no reason to suppose that the sacra of 
the Eleusinian mysteries were of any greater intrinsic significance. 





158 The Thesmophoria CH. 


F 





Clement' in a passage preceding that already quoted gives the 
Eleusinian ‘tokens, with slightly different wording and with two 
additional clauses: he says ‘the symbols of this initiation are, 
I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the 
kernos, I passed beneath the pastos.’ The scholiast? on Plato’s 
Gorgias makes a similar statement. He says ‘at the lesser 
mysteries many disgraceful things were done, and these words 
were said by those who were being initiated: I ate from the 
timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos’; he further 
adds by way of explanation ‘the kernos is the liknon or ptuon, 
Le. it is some form of winnowing fan. 

There has been much and, I think, needless controversy as to 
whether this form of the tokens belongs to the mysteries at Eleusis 
or not. From the words that precede Clement’s statement, a 
mention of Attis, Kybele and the Korybants, it is quite clear that 
he has in his mind the mysteries of the Great Mother of Asia 
Minor, but from his mentioning Demeter also, it is also clear that 
he does not exactly distinguish between the two. The mention of 
the ‘tokens’ by the scholiast on Plato is expressly made with 
reference to the Lesser Mysteries, and these, it will later (Chap. x) 
be seen, are related especially to Kore and Dionysos. The whole 
confusion rests on the simple mythological fact that Demeter 
and Cybele were but local forms of the Great Mother worshipped 
under diverse names all over Greece. Wherever she was wor- 
shipped she had mysteries, the timbrel and the cymbal came to be 
characteristic of the wilder Asiatic Mother, but the Mother at 
Eleusis also clashed the brazen cymbals. In her ‘tokens’ however 
her mystics ate from the cista and the basket, but the distinction 
is a slight one. 

The question of the kernos is of some interest. The scholiast 
states that the kernos was a winnowing fan, and the winnowing 
fan we shall later see (p. 548) was, at least in Alexandrine days, 


1 Clem. Al, Protr. 1. 2.13 Anots uvorjpea cal (leg. ai) Avs mrpos unrépa Arjunrpa 
appodiowa cvumdokal kal wjvis THs Anovs Kal Ards ixernpiar. Taira TeNoKovow ol Ppiryes 
"Arride kat KuBédn Kal KoptiBaci,—ra svuBora rijs pujoews Ta’rns Ex ruumavov payor, 
€x KupLBadou Erov, Exepvopdpynoa, bwrd Tov macTov brédvoy. 

* Schol. ad Plat. Gorg. p. 123 év ols (rots cuxpots wvornplo.s) woke wev erpdrrero 
aloxpd, édéyero de mpds Tay wvoupévwy Tatra’ €k Tuumdvou Epayov, éx KuuBddov Emory, 
éxepvopbpynoa (xképvos dé 7d Alkvov Hyouv To mrvov éorlv), bard Tov wacrdv brédvoy Kal 
ra é€&fs. ‘The concluding formulary, which does not occur in the Eleusinian con- 
fession, will be explained later (Chap. x). 


Iv | The Kernophoria 159 


used in the mysteries of Eleusis. It was a simple agricultural 
instrument taken over and mysticized by the religion of Dionysos. 
From Athenaeus! however we learn of another kind of kernos. 
In his discussion of the various kinds of cups and their uses 
he says: ‘Kernos, a vessel made of earthenware, having in it many 
_ little cups fastened to it, in which are white poppies, wheat, barley, 
pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils; and he who carries it after the fashion 
of the carrier of the liknon, tastes of these things, as Ammonius 
relates in his third book On Altars and Sacrifices.’ A second and 
rather fuller notice of the kernos is given by Athenaeus? a little 
later in discussing the kotylos. ‘Polemon in his treatise “On the 
Dian Fleece” says, “ And after this he performs the rite and takes 
it from the chamber and distributes it to those who have borne 
the kernos aloft.”’ Then follows an amplified list of the contents 
of the kernos. The additions are italicized : ‘sage, white poppies, 
wheat, barley, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils, beans, spelt, oats, a cake, 
honey, oil, wine, milk, sheep's wool unwashed. 

The list of the wayxapzria, the offering of all fruits and natural 
products, is in some respects a primitive one: the unwashed wool 
reminds us of the simple offering made by Pausanias at the cave 
of Demeter at Phigalia; but there are late additions, the manu- 
faetured olive oil and wine. Demeter in early days would assuredly 
never have accepted wine. The kernos, like the offerings it con- 
tained, is comparatively late and complex. Vessels exactly corre- 
sponding to the description given by Athenaeus have been found 
in considerable numbers in the precinct at Eleusis, both vessels 
meant for use and others obviously votive. In the accounts*® of 
the officials at Eleusis for the year 408—7 B.c. there is mention 
of a vessel called xépyvos, which in all probability is identical 
with the kernos of Athenaeus. The shape and purport of the 
vessel are clearly seen in the very perfect specimen‘ in fig. 16. 


1 Athen. x1. 52 § 476. 

2 Athen. x1. 56 § 478 dco dvw 7d Képvos meprevnvoxdtes. TotTo & éaTiv ayyetov 
Kepaueodv éxov év aiit@ moddods KoTuAlcKous KeKo\Anuévous* evetor F avrots Gputvor, 
behkwves NeuKol, rupol, KpiOal, miool, NaBupor, Wx pot, Paxol, KVapot, feral, Bpduos, TahaGror, 
ped, @dasov, oivos, yadda, dvov epiov dmduTov. 6 dé To’To BacTdcas oiov \iKvogdopyaas 
rovTwy yeverat. I have translated the difficult dyw by aloft taking it as referring to 
the carrying on the head, but see ‘Kerchnos,’ O. Rubensohn, dA. Witt. 1898, XXIII. 
p- 270, to whom I am indebted for many references. The Kernophoria is well 
shown in the Ninnion pinax in fig. 160. 

3 "Egjuepis “Apx. 1898, p. 61 xpucot cépxva I. 

4 Sévres Museum, Annual of British School at Athens, vol. 11. p. 57, Pl. ty. 





160 The Thesmophoria . CH. 


Such a vessel might well be called a separator; each of the little 
kotyliskoi attached would contain a sample of the various grains 





and products. It is easy to see how the scholiast might explain it 
as a liknon. The liknon was an implement for winnowing, separat- 
ing grain from chaff, the kernos a vessel in which various sorts of 
grain could be kept separate. The Kernophoria was nothing but a 
late and elaborate form of the offering of first-fruits. In the simple 
primaeval form of the Mysteries as certified by the tokens, we have 
but two elements, the presentation and tasting of first-fruits and 
the handling of sacra. All later accretions will be discussed in the 
chapter on Orphic Mysteries. 

In discussing the Anthesteria (p. 42) mention has already been 
made of a rite which, according to Athenaeus’, took place on the 
final day of the Mysteries. On this day, which took its name from 
the rite, two vessels called plemochoae are emptied, one towards 
the east, the other towards the west, and at the moment of out- 
pouring a mystic formulary was pronounced. Athenaeus explains 
that a plemochoe was an earthenware vessel ‘shaped like a top but 
standing secure on its basis’: it seems to have been a vessel in 


1 Athen, x1. 93 § 496. 


Iv | Purification and Sacrifice 161 


general use for the service of the underworld, for he quotes a play 
called Peirithous in which one of the characters said: 


‘That these plemochoai with well-omened words 
We may pour down into the chthonian chasm.’ 
What the mystic formulary was we cannot certainly say, but 
it is tempting to connect the libation of the plemochoe with a 
formulary recorded by Proclos.. He says ‘In the Eleusinian 
mysteries, looking up to the sky they cried aloud “ Rain,” and 
looking down to earth they cried “Be fruitful.”’ The simplicity 
of the solemn little prayer cannot be reproduced in English. It 
was a fitting close to rites so primitive. 
Last of all, over those who had been initiated were uttered, if 
we may trust Hesychius?, the mysterious words Koy€ dura. 


It remains to resume the results of the last four chapters. 
It has been seen in examining four of the great public festivals 
of Athens, the Diasia, the Anthesteria, the Thargelia, the Thesmo- 
phoria, that neither their names, nor primarily their ritual, were 
concerned with the worship of the Olympian gods to whom the 
festivals were ostensibly dedicated. When the nature of that 
ritual was examined, it was seen to consist not in sacrifice like 
that paid to the Olympians, which was of the nature of tendance 
and might be embodied in the formula do ut des, but rather of 
ceremonies of aversion based on ignorance and fear. Its formula 
was do ut abeas. In the Anthesteria the ceremonies known as 
évaytcpot were seen to be purifications (ckafappot), and by puri- 
fications were meant placations of Keres, of ghosts and sprites. In 
the Thargelia the ceremony of the pharmakos was seen to be 
also a purification, but in the sense not of the placation or 
riddance of ghosts and sprites but of a magical cleansing from 
physical evil. In the Thesmophoria the ceremony with the pigs 
was preceded by ceremonies of purification, and was in itself of 
magical intent. Moveover the element of cursing and devotion 
was seen to lie at the root of the later notion of consecration. To 
these three festivals, taken from the three seasons of the agri- 


1 Procl. ad Plat. Tim. p. 293 év rots ’Edevowviows els wév Tov ovpavoy avaBd€érovTes 
éBbwy ‘ve,’ karaBréWarres dé els THY yh ‘KvE.’ 

2 Hesych. s.v. Koy dumat: émipadvnua rererecuevors. Mr F. M. Cornford suggests 
that the original form may have been Kéyiov dé, ‘Sound the conch—enough. 
See also Lobeck, Aglaoph. 775. 


H. 11 


162 The Thesmophoria - [On rae 


cultural year, has now been added the rite of the Eleusinian 
Mysteries, the gist of which has been shown to be purification as 
preliminary to the handling of magical sacra and to the partaking 
of first-fruits. ; 

The only just way of understanding the religious notions of a 
particular race is to examine the terminology of the language of 
that race. Our modern notion of ancient religion is largely summed 
up by the word ‘sacrifice.’ We are too apt to ask ‘what was the 
nature of sacrifice among the Greeks?’ If we follow the lead of 
their language instead of imposing our language on them, it is 
abundantly clear that sacrifice, with all our modern connotations of 
vicarious expiation and of mystical communion, they had not. All 
the ancient ceremonies, so far considered, point to a thought simpler 
and nowise less beautiful or less deeply religious, and that thought 
is purification. Purification practically unknown to Olympian 
worship is the keynote of the lower stratum. 

It is all important that this should be clearly and emphatically 
stated at this point in order that the sequel may be intelligible. 
When the new impulse connected with the names of Dionysos 
and Orpheus entered Greece, it left aside the great and popular 
Olympian system embodied in the formula do ut des, and, by a 
true instinct, fastened on an element which, if in some respectsvit 
was lower, was truer to fact and had in it higher possibilities, 
a religion that recognized evil, though mainly in physical form, 
and that sought for purification. 

The essence of that new religion was, as will later be shown, 
the belief that man could become god: the new ritual feature it 
‘introduced, a feature wholly lacking in the old uneaten ‘ sacrifices, 
_was mystical communion by the eating of the body of the god. 
But, because man was mortal, there was mortality to be purged 
away; and hence, although with a new faith and hope, men reverted 
to the old ritual of purification. 

So much by anticipation ; but before we come to the study of 
the new impulse it is necessary to leave ritual and turn to theology, 
which is in fact mythology: the rites have been considered, and now 
in the next three chapters something must be said of the beings 
worshipped,—at first in vague shifting outlines as ghosts and 
sprites,—later crystallized into clear shapes as goddesses and gods. 








CHAPTER V. 


THE DEMONOLOGY OF GHOSTS AND SPRITES AND BOGEYS. 


‘a Merd\ayyol Kal POeEpcireNneic 
Ktipec *Epinyec.’ 


In the preceding chapters the nature of Greek ritual has been 

discussed. The main conclusion that has emerged is that this 
ritual in its earlier phases was mainly characterized by a tendency 
to what the Greeks called azorpo7n, ie. the turning away, the 
aversion. of evil. This tendency was however rarely quite un- 
touched by an impulse more akin to our modern notion of worship, 
eee Oeparreta, i.e. the induction, the fostering of good 
influences. 
Incidentally we have of course gathered something of the 
nature of the objects of worship. When the ritual was not an 
attempt at the direct impulsion of nature, we have had brief 
uncertain glimpses of sprites and ghosts and underworld divinities. 
It now remains to trace with more precision these vague theological 
or demonological or mythological outlines, to determine the 
character of the beings worshipped and something of the order of 
their development. 

In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to 
formulate than in ritual. Ritual, ie. what men did, is either 
known or not known; what they meant by what they did—the 
connecting link between ritual and theology—can sometimes be 
certainly known, more often precariously inferred. Still more 
hazardous is the attempt to determine how man thought of 
the objects or beings to whom his ritual was addressed, in a word 
what was his theology, or, if we prefer the term, his mythology. 

At the outset one preliminary caution is imperative. Our 

Riseeg 


- 


SS ae 


164 . Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


minds are imbued with current classical mythology, our imagination 
peopled with the vivid personalities, the clear-cut outlines of the 
Olympian gods; it is only by a somewhat severe mental effort that 
we realize the fact essential to our study that there were no gods 
at all, that what we have to investigate is not so many actual facts 
and existences but only conceptions of the human mind, shifting 
and changing colour with every human mind that conceived them. 
Art which makes the image, literature which crystallizes attributes 
and functions, arrest and fix this shifting kaleidoscope ; but, until 
the coming of art and literature and to some extent after, the 
formulary of theology is ‘all things are in flux’ (arava pet). 

Further, not only are we dealing solely with conceptions of the 
human mind, but often with conceptions of a mind that conceived 
things in a fashion alien to our own. There is no greater bar to 
that realizing of mythology! which is the first condition of its 
being understood, than our modern habit of clear analytic thought. 
The very terms we use are sharpened to an over nice discrimina- 
tion. The first necessity 1s that by an effort of the sympathetic 
imagination we should think back the ‘many’ we have so sharply 
and strenuously divided, into the haze of the primitive ‘ one.’ 

Nor must we regard this haze of the early morning as a dele- 
terious mental fog, as a sign of disorder, weakness, oscillation. It 
is not confusion or even synthesis; rather it is as it were a proto- 


_» plasmic fulness and forcefulness not yet articulate into the diverse 


forms of its ultimate births. It may even happen, as in the case 
of the Olympian divinities, that articulation and discrimination 
sound the note of approaching decadence. As Maeterlinck? 
beautifully puts it, la clarté parfaite west-elle pas d’ordinaire le 
signe de la lassitucde des idées ? 

There is a practical reason why it is necessary to bear in mind 
this primary fusion, though not confusion, of ideas. Theology, after 
articulating the one into the many and diverse, after a course of 
exclusive and determined discrimination, after differentiating a 
number of departmental gods and spirits, usually monotheizes, 
ie. resumes the many into the one. Hence, as will be constantly 
seen, mutatis mutandis, a late philosophizing author is often of 


1 My position in this matter was stated long ago in an article in the Journal of 
Hellenic Studies xx. 1899, p. 211, 244. 
2 Sagesse et Destinée, p. 76. 





v] The Ker as Evil Sprite 165 


great use in illustrating a primitive conception: the multiform 
divinity of an Orphic Hymn is nearer to the primitive mind than 
the clear-cut outlines of Homer’s Olympians. 





In our preliminary examination of Athenian festivals we found 
underlying the Diasia the worship of a snake, underlying the 
Anthesteria the revocation of souls. In the case of the Thesmo- 
phoria we found magical ceremonies for the promotion of fertility 
addressed as it would seem directly to the earth itself: in the 
Thargelia we had ceremonies of purification not primarily addressed 
to any one. In the Diasia and Anthesteria only was there clear 
evidence of some sort of definite being or beings as the object of 
worship. The meaning of snake-worship will come up for discus- 
sion later (p. 326), for the present we must confine ourselves to 
the theology or demonology of the beings worshipped in the 
Anthesteria, the Keres, sprites, or ghosts, and the theological 
shapes into which they are developed and discriminated. 


THE KER AS GHOST AND SPRITE. 


That the Keres dealt with in the Anthesteria— worshipped’ is 
of course too modern a word—were primarily ghosts, admits, in the 


face of the evidence previously adduced (pp. 43, 44), of no doubt. , 


That in the fifth century B.c. they were thought of as little 
winged sprites the vase-painting in fig. 7 clearly shows, and to it 
might be added the evidence of countless other Athenian white 


lekythi where the eedolon or ghost is shown fluttering about the, 


grave. But to the ancients Keres was a word of far larger and 
vaguer connotation than our modern ghosts, and we must grasp this 
wider connotation if we would understand the later developments 
of the term. 

Something of their nature has already appeared in the apotro- 
paic precautions of the Anthesteria. Pitch was smeared on the 
doors to catch them, cathartic buckthorn was ¢ to eject them ; 
they were dreaded as sources of evil; they were, if not exactly evil 
spirits, certainly spirits that brought evil: else why these precau- 
tions? Plato has this in his mind when he says’ ‘ There are many 


1 Legg. XI. p. 937 p Tots mielorors adtav olov Kijpes émimepixacw, al KaTtaptalvoucl 
Te kal kaTapputalvovew ard. 


} 


166 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


fair things in the life of mortals, but in most of them there are 
as it were adherent Keres which pollute and disfigure them. 
Here we have not~merely a philosophical notion, that there is 
a soul of evil in things good, but the reminiscence surely of an 
actual popular faith, 1e. the belief that Keres, like a sort of 
5 personified bacilli, engendered corruption and pollution’. To 
such influences all things mortal are exposed. Conon? in telling 
the story of the miraculous head of Orpheus (p. 468) says that 
when it was found by the fisherman ‘it was still singing, nor 
had it suffered any change from the sea nor any other of the 
outrages that human Keres inflict on the dead, but it was still 
blooming and bleeding with fresh blood.’ Conon is of course a 
late writer, and full of borrowed poetical phrases, but the expres- 
|} sion human Keres (dv@parivar xfjpes) is not equivalent to the 
Destiny of man, it means rather sources of corruption inherent in 
man. 

In fig. 7 we have seen a representation of the harmless 
Keres, the souls fluttering out of the grave-pithos. Fortunately 
ancient art has also left us 
a representation of a bale- 
ful Ker.. The picture in 
fig. 17 is from a pelike® 
found at Thisbe and now 
in the Berlin Museum‘. 
Heracles, known by his 
lion skin and quiver, swings 
his rudely hewn club («da- 
Sos) against a tiny winged 

figure with shrivelled body 
' and distorted ugly face. 
We might have been at 
a loss to give a name to 
his feeble though repulsive Fic. 17. 





1 I am indebted for this and many important references to the article on Keres 
by Dr Otto Crusius in Roscher’s Lewicon (Bd. m. 1148). Dr Crusius’ admirable 
exposition of the nature of the Keres suffers only from one defect, that he feels 
himself obliged to begin it with the comparatively late literary conceptions of 
Homer. 

2 Conon, Narr. xiv. 

® Published and explained as Heracles xnpauivrns by Professor Furtwiingler, 
Jahrb. d. Inst. 1895, p. 37. 

4 Berlin, Inv. 3317. 


v] 4 oO Phe%ar as Evil Sylus 167 
antagonist but for an Orphic Hymn to Heracles! which ends with 
the prayer : 

‘Come, blessed hero, come and bring allayments 

Of all diseases. Brandishing thy club, 

Drive forth the baleful fates ; with poisoned shafts 

Banish the noisome Keres far away. 

The primitive Greek leapt by his religious imagination to 
a forecast of the truth that it has taken science centuries to 
establish, 1e. the fact that disease is caused by little live things, 
germs—bacilli we call them, he used the word Keres, A fragment 
of the early comic poet Sophron* speaks of Herakles throttling 
Hepiales. Hepiales must be the demon of nightmare, well 
known to us from other sources and under various confused names 
as Kphialtes, Epiales, Hepialos. The Etymologicon Magnum® 
explains ‘ Hepialos’ as a shivering fever and ‘a daimon that comes 
upon those that are asleep.’ It has been proposed to regard the 
little winged figure which Herakles is clearly taking by the 
throat as Hepiales*, demon of nightmare, rather than as a Ker. 
The question can scarcely be decided, but the doubt is as in- 
structive as any certainty. Hepiales is a disease caused by 
a Ker; ie. it is a special form of Ker, the nightmare bacillus. 
Blindness also was caused by a Ker, as was MeseAmies ¢ hence the 
expression ‘casting a black Ker on their eyes®’ Blindness and 
madness, blindness of body > and spirit are scarcely distinguished, 
as in the blindness of Oedipus; both come of the Keres-Erinyes. 
To the primitive mind all diseases are caused by, or rather are,‘ 

bad spirits. Porphyry® tells us that blisters are caused by evil 
spirits which come at us when we eat certain food and settle on our 


1 Orph. Hymn. xtt. 
é\Oe pdkap, votiowy OeXkTHpia TavTa Kopulfwv- 
éféXacov 6€ Kakas dras, KN\ddov év yxepl madwv, 
mrTnvots T loBddo.s Khpas XaNeras amdremute. 

2 Ahrens, No. 99b, ‘Hpaxdjs ‘Hariddnra rriywr. 

3 s.v. pryomtperov. 

4 Roscher, Lexicon s.v. Nosoi p. 459, following Professor Furtwiingler. For 
the whole subject of the demonic cause of nightmare, see Roscher’s Monograph on 
Ephialtes, Abhandl. d. K. Stichs. Ges. Phil.-Hist. Kl. xx. 1900. 

® Eur. Phoen. 950 wédawayv xijp’ ém’ dupacw Badwr. 

6 Wolff. Porphyr. De philos. ex orac. haur. p. 149 = Eusebius Praep. Ev. 4. 23.3 
kal yap padora Tats Trovats Tpopats xalpovor, OLTOULED wy yap Nua@v mpociace kai T pootga- 
yoUgL T@ TwWmaTL. Kal did TOUTO ai ayvetat, ov bud Tovs Peovs Tpoonyoupuerws arn’ tv’ ovroe 
drocréot: baduora & aiware xalpovor kai tats axabapoias Kal dmrodavovet TovUTwr, 
ela dvvovTes Tots xpwuevors. The word rpocnyouuevws does not so far as I know occur 
elsewhere, it seems from the context to mean ‘inductively,’ with a view to induce 
rather than expel, 


bd . — 
168 Demonology of Ghosts Sprites, Bogeys [On 


bodies. He goes to the very heart of ancient religious ‘aversion’ 
when he adds that it is on account of this that purifications are 
practised, not in order that we may induce the presence of the gods, 
but that these wretched things may keep off. He might have added, 
it is on account of these bad spirits that we fast; indeed ayveia, the 
word he uses, means abstinence as well as purity. Eating is 
highly dangerous because you have your mouth open and a Ker 
may get in. If a Ker should get in when you are about to 
partake of specially holy food there will naturally be difficulties. 
So argues the savage. Porphyry being a vegetarian says that 
these bad spirits specially delight in blood and impurities generally 
and they ‘creep into people who make use of such things.” If you 
kept about you holy plants with strong scents and purging 
properties, like rue and buckthorn, you might keep the Keres away, 
or, if they got in, might speedily and safely eject them. 

The physical character of the Keres, their connection with ‘the 
lusts of the flesh, comes out very clearly in a quaint moralising 
poem preserved by Stobaeus and attributed to Linos. It deals 
with the dangers of Keres and the necessity for meeting them 
by ‘purification. Its ascetic tone and its attribution to Linos 
probably point to Orphic origin. It runs as follows: 

‘Hearken to these my sayings, zealously lend me your hearing 

To the simple truth about all things. Drive far away the disastrous 

Keres, they who destroy the herd of fhe vulgar and fetter 

All things around with curses manifold. Many and dreadful 

Shapes do they take to deceive. But keep them far from thy spirit, 

Ever watchful in mind. This is the purification 

That shall rightly and truly purge thee to sanctification 

(If but in truth thou hatest the baleful race of the Keres), 

And most of all thy belly, the giver of all things shameful, 

For desire is her charioteer and she drives with the driving of madness.’ 

It is commonly said that diseases are ‘ personified’ by the 
Greeks. This is to invert the real order of primitive thought. It 
is not that a disease is realized as a power and then turned into a 
person, it is that primitive man seems unable to conceive of any 

1 Stob. v. 22. Alvov. 

Khpas admwoduevos wodvrimovas al re BeBrwv 
oxAov avictGoar dras wepl mavra medaor 
mavTolats poppwy xaerwv amariuar Exovcat 
Tas wev ard Wuxns elpyew pPudaxator vdo.0. 
ovTos yap ce Kadapuos dvrws dikalws tooredoert, 
el kev ddnOely purges 6odv yévos avrav, 


vnddy ev mpwricr’ aloxpav Swrepay amrdvrwv 
qv émOvula hyroxer mapyoic. xadwois. 


ee \ The Ker as Evil Sprite 169 


force except as resulting from some person or being or sprite, 
something a little ike himself. Such is the state of mind of the 
modern Greek peasant who writes Xodépa with a capital letter. 
Hunger, pestilence, madness, nightmare have each a sprite behind 
them ; are all sprites. 

Of course, as Hesiod? knew, there were ancient golden days 
when these sprites were not let loose, when they were shut up safe 
in a cask and 


‘Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth 
Lived without ills, aloof from grievous toil 
And catching plagues which Keres gave to men2’ 


But alas! 


‘The woman with her hands took the great lid 
From off the cask and scattered them, and thus 
Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone 
Remained therein, safe held beneath the rim, 
Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid’ 


Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be con- 
sidered later (p. 283) ; for the moment we have only to note what 
manner of things came out of it. The account is strange and 
significant. She shut the cask too late: 


‘For other myriad evils wandered forth 

To man, the earth was full, and full the sea. 
Diseases, that all round by day and night 
Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled, 
Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice 
Had taken away?’ 


Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things 
are Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in com- 
menting on the passage, ‘Hesiod gives them (1e. the diseases) | 
bodily form making them approach without sound, showing that 
even of these things spirits are the guardians, sending invisibly 


1 Hes. Erg. 90 
mpl wev yap (weckov emt xOovt PON avOpdruv 
voopw drep Te kak@v Kal drep XaXeTolo movoLo 
volowy T dpyadéwy air’ avdpdot knpas édwKar. 

2 I prefer to read: aor’ dvdpict kipes Zdwxay, i.e. ‘grievous diseases which Keres 
gave to men,’ but I have translated the text as it stands, since possibly Hesiod, 
though he clearly knew of a connection between véco and xijpes, may have inverted 
cause and effect. I have already discussed the passage in the Journal of Hellenic 
Studies, xx. 1900, p. 104. 

3 Hes. Erg. 94. 

4 Hes. Erg. 102. Procl. ad 102 écwparomoince 5€ adras mpooiovcas apwyous 
moujoas évdeckvipevos bre Kal TovTwy epopor daiwovés elow- oirwes dpdow adards 
émuméumrovres Tas vécous ras bro Thy Hivapuévny rerayuevas Kal Tas év 7H TiOw Kijpas 
OvacmelpovTes. 


170 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [0u. 


the diseases decreed by fate and scattering the Keres in the 
cask. After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres were 
presided over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits, 
but primitive man believes the Keres are the spirits, are the 
diseases. Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that 
the jar or pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother 
Pandora (p. 286), and that the Keres were ghosts. ‘Earth,’ says 
Hesiod, ‘ was full and full the sea.’ This crowd of Keres close-packed 
is oddly emphasized in a fragment by an anonymous poet?: 
‘Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill, 
And round about us Keres crowding still; 
No chink of opening 
Is left for entering.’ 

This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering 
about men haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality 
to their vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos? 
seems to echo Hesiod when he says ‘hope feeds all men’—but 
hope is all in vain because of the imminent demon host that work 
for man’s undoing, disease and death and war and _ shipwreck 
and suicide. 


‘No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold 
Mortals attend, woes and calamities 
That none may scape.’ 


Here and elsewhere to translate ‘ Keres’ by fates is to make a 
premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things 
not impersonations. So when Aeschylus* puts into the mouth of 
his Danaid women the prayer 


‘Nor may diseases, noisome swarm, 
Settle upon our heads, to harm 
Our citizens,’ 


the ‘noisome swarm’ is no mere ‘ poetical’ figure but the reflection 
of a real primitive conviction of live pests. 
The little fluttering insect-like diseases are naturally spoken of 


1 Frg. ap. Plut. Consol. ad Apoll. xxv1. Tl otv ; apd vy’ queis rodro dua rod Ndyou 
pabety ob duvdueba, 006 emriioylcacdar; bre wrelyn wev yala kax@v mreln 5é Odd\acoa Kal 
To.dde Ovnrotot Kaka kax@v audi re Kipes eledvrar, Keve 5° elodvors odd’ alPépe. 
Bergk (rg. adesp. 2 8) points out that Plutarch’s second quotation is an elegiac 
couplet, and for the ms. al@épc reads ’Aidew. This gives no satisfactory sense. 
Mr Gilbert Murray reads d@ép a conjecture made certain by a passage in the 
dialogue ‘ Theophrastos’ (p. 399 £) by Aeneas of Gaza, mdjpns dé xal } yh Kal 
Oddacoa Kal Ta bd yi wavTa’ Kal ws Edy Tis TOV Tap’ Huly copy Kevdy ovdev od? cov 
abépa kal rplyxa Barely. 

2 Simon. Amorg. 1. 20. 3 Aesch. Suppl. 684. 


v] The Ker as Evil Sprite . 171 


for the most part in the plural, but in the Philoctetes of Sophocles! 
the festering sore of the hero is called ‘an ancient Ker’; here again 
the usage is primitive rather than poetical. Viewing the Keres 
‘as little mherent physical pests, we are not surprised to learn 
from Theognis? that 
‘For hapless man wine doth two Keres hold— 
Limb-slacking Thirst, Drunkenness overbold.’ 
Nor is it man alone who is beset by these evil sprites. In 
that storehouse of ancient superstition, the Orphic Lithica®, we 
hear of Keres who attack the fields. Against them the best 
remedy is the Lychnis stone, which was also good to keep off a 
hailstorm. 


‘Lychnis, from pelting hail be thou our shield, 
Keep off the Keres who attack: each field’ 


And Theophrastus‘ tells us that each locality has its own Keres 
dangerous to plants, some coming from the ground, some from the 
air, some from both. Fire also, it would seem, might be infested 
by Keres. A commentator on Philo says that it is important that 
no profane fire, i.e. such as is in ordinary use, should touch an 
altar because it may be contaminated by myriads of Keres’. 
TInstructive too is the statement of Stesichorus’, who according 
to tradition ‘called the Keres by the name Telchines.’ Eustathius 
in quoting the statement of Stesichorus adds as explanatory of 
Keres tas oxotwaeis: the word cxotwcecs is late and probably a 
gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical and spiritual. 
Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with Telchines is 
of capital interest and takes us straight back into the world of 
ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of 
antiquity, and Strabo’ tells us that one of their magic arts was to 


1 Soph. Phil. 4. 2 Theog. 837. 
3 Orph. Lith. 268 Avyv, ob 5’ éx medlov piiiov Tr amdepye xahafay 
juetépov Kal Khpas boat orixdwow én’ aypovs. 

4 Theophr. De caus. pl. 5. 10. 4 &kacroe r&v Torwy idias exer Kijpas, of mev ex Tod 
édagous of 5’ éx Tov dépos of 5’ é& andor. . ; 

> Srws mh mpocdwatto Tod Bwuod dua 7d puplas lows avameudxXOar Kihpas. This 
reference I borrow from the Thesaurus of Stephanos s.v., but I have been unable 
to verify the quotation. The reference as given by Stephanos is Bud. ap. Philon. 
V. M. 3. In connection with fire and fire-places the belief in Keres is not 
dead to-day. An Irish servant of mine who failed to light a fire firmly declined 
to make a second attempt on the ground that she knew ‘there was a little fairy in 
the grate.’ The Ker in this case was, as often in antiquity, a malign draught. 

6 Frg. ap. Kustath. 772. 3. 7 xiv. 2. 652. 


172 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cuH. 


‘besprinkle animals and plants with the water of Styx and 
sulphur mixed with it, with a view to destroy them.’ 

Thus the Keres, from being merely bad influences inherent 
and almost automatic, became exalted and personified into actual 
magicians. Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus 
allows us to see how this happened. He is commenting on the 
ancient tribe of the Kouretes: these Kouretes, he says, were Cretan 
and also called Thelgines (sic), and they were sorcerers and 
magicians. ‘Of these there were two sorts: one sort craftsmen and 
skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious to all good things; 
these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to be the 
origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which they 
used to brew magic potions from roots. They (ie. the former 
sort) invented statuary and discovered metals, and they were 
amphibious and of strange varieties of shape, some were like 
demons, some like men, some like fishes, some like serpents; 
and the story went that some had no hands, some no feet, 
and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And 
they say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.’ Finally 
comes the significant statement that they perished struck down by 
the thunder of Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo. The old order is 
slain by the new. To the imagination of the conqueror the 
conquered are at once barbarians and magicians, monstrous and 
magical, hated and feared, craftsmen and medicine men, demons, 
beings endowed like the spirits they worship, in a word Keres- 
Telchines!. When we find the good, fruitful, beneficent side of 
the Keres effaced and ignored we must always remember this 
fact that we see them through the medium of a conquering 
civilization’. 


THE KERES OF OLD AGE AND DEATH. 


By fair means or foul, by such ritual procedures as have already 
been noted, by the chewing of buckthorn, the sounding of brass, 


1 Professor Ridgeway, Harly Age of Greece 1. p. 177. 

° As evidence of the evil reputation of Keres Mr Gilbert Murray calls my atten- 
tion to the pun in Eur. Tro. 424 which seems to have escaped the attention of 
commentators: 

tl mor’ €xovot Totvoua ; 
Khpuxes, év adwéxOnua mayxowov Pporots. 
‘What name have they? A Kerish name.’ Hermes as x7jpvé invokes and revokes 
Kijpes With his knpuxetov, see pp. 26 and 43. 


—— om 


v] The Keres of Old Age and Death — 173 


the making of comic figures, most of the Keres could be kept at 
bay; but there were two who waited relentless, who might not be 
averted, and these were Old Age and Death. It is the thought * 
that these two Keres are waiting that with the lyric poets most of 


all overshadows the brightness of life. Theognis? prays to Zeus: 


‘Keep far the evil Keres, me defend 
From Old Age wasting, and from Death the end.’ 


These haunting Keres of disease, disaster, old age and death 
Mimnermus? can never forget : 
‘We blossom like the leaves that come in spring, 
What time the sun begins to flame and glow, 
And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening 
Nor good nor evil from the cods we know, 


But always at the goal black Keres stand 
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death within her hand. 


And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun 
Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die 
Not live is best, for evils many a one 
Are born within the soul. And Poverty 
Has wasted one man’s house with niggard care, 
And one has lost his children. Desolate 
Of this his earthly longing, he must fare 
To Hades. And another for his fate 
Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man 
Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban. 
Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All 
things are beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of 
Mimnermus are of interest at this point because they show the 
emergence of the two most dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, 
from the swarm of minor ills. Poverty, disease and desolation are 
no longer definitely figured as Keres. The vase-painter shows this 
fact in a cruder form. On a red-figured amphora (fig. 18) in the 
Louvre*® Herakles is represented lifting his club to slay a shrivelled 
ugly little figure leaning on a stick—the figure obviously is an old 
man. Fortunately it is inscribed yfpas. It is not an old man, 
but Old Age itself, the dreaded Ker. The representation is a 
close parallel to Herakles slaying the Ker in fig. 17. The Ker of 
Old Age has no wings: these the vase-painter rightly felt were 
inappropriate. It is in fact a Ker developed one step further into 
an impersonation. The vase may be safely dated as belonging to 
about the middle of the 5th century B.c. It is analogous in style, 


1 Theog. 707. 2 Mimnermus 2. 
3 Pottier Cat. 343. P. Hartung, Philologos u. (N. F. 1v. 2) Taf. 1. 


174 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CcH. 


as in subject, to an amphora? in the British Museum bearing 
the love-name Charmides. 

Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, 
to the great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a 





Fic. 18. 


flitting remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. 

This is the usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. 

Homer's phraseology is rarely primitive—often fossilized—and the 

regularly recurring ‘Ker of death®’ («7p @avarouo) is heir to a long 

ancestry. In Homer we catch the word Ker at a moment of 

transition ; it is half death, half death-spirit. Odysseus* says 
‘Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,’ 


where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents: 
they are both death and the sprite of death, or as we might say 
1 Cat. 290. Cecil Smith, J.H.S 1883, Pl. xxx. p. 96. 


2 Od. x1. 898 Tis vi ce khp édduacce rarvndeyéos Pavdro.o. 
8 Od. xm. 158 "H Kev adevduevor Odvaroy Kal Kijpa piywuer. 


Vv] The Ker of Death 175 


now-a-days death and the angel of death. Homer’s conception so 
dominates our minds that the custom has obtained of uniformly 
translating ‘ Ker’ by fate, a custom that has led to much confusion 
of thought. 

Two things with respect to Homer's usage must be borne in 
mind. First, his use of the word Ker is, as might be expected, far 
more abstract and literary than the usage we have already noted. 
It is impossible to say that Homer has in his mind anything of the 
nature of a tiny winged bacillus. Second, in Homer Ker is almost 
always defined and limited by the genitive Oavarovo, and this looks 
as though, behind the expression, there lay the half-conscious 
knowledge that there were Keres of other things than death. 
Ker itself is not death, but the two have become well-nigh 
inseparable. 

Some notion of the double nature, good and bad, of Keres seems 
to survive in the expression two-fold Keres (duvy@advar Kijpes). 
Achilles! says: 

‘My goddess-mother silver-footed Thetis 

Hath said that Keres two-fold bear me on 

To the term of death,’ 
It is true that both the Keres are carrying him deathward, but 
there is strongly present the idea of the diversity of fates. The 
English language has in such cases absolutely no equivalent for 
Ker, because it has no word weighted with the like associations. 

In one passage only in the Iliad?, ie. the description of the 
shield of Achilles, does a Ker actually appear in person, on the 
battlefield : 

‘And in the thick of battle there was Strife 

And Clamour, and there too the baleful Ker. 

She grasped one man alive, with bleeding wound, 

Another still unwounded, and one dead 

She by his feet dragged through the throng. And red 

Her raiment on her shoulders with men’s blood.’ ‘ 
A work of art, it must be remembered, is being described, and the 
feeling is more Hesiodic than Homeric. The Ker is in this case 
not a fate but a horrible she-demon of slaughter. 


1 Jl. 1x. 410. 2 Tl. xvii. 535. 


176 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


THE KER AS HARPY AND WIND-DEMON. 


In Homer the Keres are no doubt mainly death-spirits, but they 
have another function, they actually carry off the souls to Hades. 
Odysseus says! : 

‘Howbeit him Death-Keres carried off 

To Hades’ house.’ 
It is impossible here to translate Keres by ‘ fates, the word is too 
abstract: the Keres are mpoo7odo, angels, messengers, death- 
demons, souls that carry off souls. 

The idea that underlies this constantly recurring formulary, 
Knpes EBav Savatoro pépovoat, emerges clearly when we come to 
consider those analogous apparitions, the Harpies. The Harpies 
betray their nature clearly in their name, in its uncontracted form 
‘“’Apemuta, which appears on the vase-painting in fig. 19; they are 
the Snatchers, winged women-demons, hurrying along like the 
storm wind and carrying all things to destruction. The vase- 
painting in fig. 19 from a large black-figured vessel in the Berlin 





Fie. 19. 


Museum* is specially instructive because, though the winged 
demons are inscribed as Harpies, the scene of which they form 


1 Od. xiv. 207. 2 Cat. 1682, Arch, Zeit. 1882, Pl. 9. 


vd | The Ker as Harpy 177 


part, ie. the slaying of Medusa, clearly shows that they are | 
Gorgons; so near akin, so shifting and intermingled are the two 
conceptions. On another vase (fig. 20), also in the Berlin Museum}, 








we see an actual Gorgon with the typical Gorgon’s head and 
protruding tongue performing the function of a Harpy, ie. of a 
Snatcher. We say ‘an actual Gorgon, but it is not a Gorgon of 
the usual form but a_bird-woman 
with a Gorgon’s head. The bird- 
woman is currently and rightly as- 
sociated with the Siren, a creature 
to be discussed later (p. 197), a crea- 
ture malign though seductive in 
Homer, but gradually softened by the 
Athenian imagination into a sorrow- 
ful death angel. 

The tender bird-women of the so- 
called ‘Harpy tomb’ from Lycia (fig. 
21), now in the British Museum, 
perform the functions of a Harpy, but 
very gently. They are at least near 
akin to the sorrowing Sirens on Athe- 
nian tombs. We can scarcely call them 





Fic. 21. 


1 Cat. 2157, Jahrbuch d. Arch. Inst. 1. p. 210. 


178 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys (0H. 


by the harsh name of the‘ Snatchers.’ And yet, standing as it did in 
Lycia, this ‘ Harpy tomb’ may be the outcome of the same stratum 
of mythological conceptions as the familiar story of the daughters 
of the Lycian Pandareos. Penelope’ in her desolation cries aloud : 

‘Would that the storm might snatch me adown its dusky way 

And cast me forth where Ocean is outpour’d with ebbing spray, 

As when Pandareos’ daughters the storm winds bore away,’ 
and then, harking back, she tells the ancient Lycian story of the 
fair nurture of the princesses and how Aphrodite went to high 
Olympus to plan for them a goodly marriage. But whom the 
gods love die young: 

‘Meantime the Harpies snatched away the maids, and gave them o’er 
To the hateful ones, the Erinyes, to serve them evermore?’ 

Early death was figured by the primitive Greek as a snatching 
away by evil death-demons, storm-ghosts. These snatchers he 
called Harpies, the modern Greek calls them Nereids. In Homer’s 
lines we seem to catch the winds as snatchers, half-way to their 
full impersonation as Harpies. To give them a capital letter is to 
crystallize their personality prematurely. Even when they become 
fully persons, their name carried to the Greek its adjectival sense 
now partly lost to us. 


Another function of the Harpies links them very closely with 
the Keres, and shows in odd and instructive fashion the animistic 
habit of ancient thought. The Harpies not only snatch away 
souls to death but they give life, bringing things to birth. A 
Harpy was the mother by Zephyros of the horses of Achilles*, 
Both parents are in a sense winds, only the Harpy wind halts 
between horse and woman. By winds as Vergil tells us mares 
became pregnant‘, 


1 Od, xx. 66 
iq) éretrd w dvaprdataca Aveda 
olxotro mpopépovca Kar’ hepbevra Ké\evba 
év mpoxons 6€ Badoe aoppbov ’Qxeavoio, 
ws 6’ bre Ilavdapéou Kovpas dvé\ovro OveANaL. 
OFS 3 art 


Toppa dé Tas KoUpas apmruar avnpelavTo 
kal p’ €docav arvyepnow éepwicw daudurorevev. 
3 Iliad xvi. 150. 
4 Georg. 11, 274 
saepe sine ullis 
conjugiis vento gravidae, mirabile dictu. 


Vv] The Ker as Wind-demon 179 


As such a Harpy, half horse, half Gorgon-woman, Medusa. is 
represented on a curious Boeotian vase (fig. 22) of very archaic 





TG 22s 


style now in the Louvre. The representation is instructive, it 
shows how in art as in literature the types of Gorgon and Harpy 
were for a time in flux; a particular artist could please his own 
fancy. The horse Medusa was apparently not a success, for she did 
not survive. 

It is easy enough to see how winds were conceived of as 
Snatchers, death-demons, but why should they impregnate, give 
life? It is not, I think, by a mere figure of speech that breezes 
(wvovat) are spoken of as ‘life-begetting’ (fwoyovor) and ‘soul- 
rearing’ (yruxotpodot). It is not because they are in our sense life- 
giving and refreshing as well as destructive: the truth hes deeper 
down. Only life can give life, only a soul gives birth to a soul; the 
winds are souls as well as breaths (7vevara). Here as so often we 
get at the real truth through an ancient Athenian cultus practice. 
When an Athenian was about to be married he prayed and 
sacrificed, Suidas tells us, to the Tritopatores. The statement is 
quoted from Phanodemus who wrote a book on Attic Matters*. 


1 Bull. de Corr. Hell. xx11. 1898, Pl. v. 

2 Suidas s.v. Tritopatores. Pavddyuos dé év exrw pyolv bre wdvor "APnvaioe Avovct 
Te kal ebxovrar abrois brép yevéoews maldwy Grav yaueiv uéNtwow. ev 5é 7H ’Opgdéws 
Puoik@.. ... dvoudferbat Tods Tprromdropas ’Auadkeldnv kat Ipwroxdéa kai Hpwroxdéovra 
Oupwpods kal piNaxas civar Tov dvéuwy and supra Anjuwy év rH ’ATOide pyoiv dvéuous 
elvat Tods Tpitordropas: Piddxopos dé Tovs Tprromdrpers wdvTwy yeyovevar Tpwrous. Thy 
bev yap yav Kal Tov HrLov, pnoiv...... yoveis aitav nriaravro oi Tore dvOpwiot Tous dé Ex 
TovTwy Tplrous maTépas. 


12—2 


180 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [OH. 


Suidas tells us also who the Tritopatores were. They were, as we 
might guess from their name, fathers in the third degree, fore- 
fathers, ancestors, ghosts, and Démon in his Atthis said they were 
winds. To the winds, it has already been seen (p. 67), are offered 
such expiatory sacrifices (spayia) as are due to the spirits of the 
underworld. The idea that the Tritopatores were winds as well as 
ghosts was never lost. To Photius and Suidas they are ‘lords of 
the winds’ and the Orphics make them ‘gate-keepers and guardians 
of the winds.’ From ghosts of dead men, Hippocrates? tells us, 
came nurture and growth and seeds, and the author of the 
Geoponica* says that winds give life not only to plants but to all 
things. It was natural enough that the winds should be divided 
into demons beneficent and maleficent, as it depends where you 
live whether a wind from a particular quarter will do you good 
or, ail. | 

In the black-figured vase-painting in fig. 23, found at Naukratis 
and now in the British Museum’, a local nymph is depicted: only 





the lower part of her figure is left us, drapery, the ends of her long 


1 Hipp. Iept évury, 1. p. 14 dard yap rév drobavéyTwr ai tpopal Kal adéjoes Kal 
omrépuara. 

* Geop. 1X. 3 ob ra pura wdvov a\rAG Kal mavra fwoyovovar. 

3 Cat. B 4. 





v] The Ker as Wind-demon 181 


hair and her feet, but she must be the nymph Cyrene beloved of 
Apollo, for close to her and probably held in her hand is a great 
branch of the silphium plant. To right of her approaching to 
minister or to worship are winged genii. It is the very image of 
Oeparreia, tendance, ministration, fostering care, worship, all in one. 
The genii tend the nymph who is the land itself, her and her 
products. The figures to the right are bearded: they can scarcely 
be other than the spirits of the North wind, the Boreadae, 
the cool healthful wind that comes over the sea to sun-burnt 
Africa. If these be Boreadae, the opposing figures, beardless and 
therefore almost certainly female, are Harpies, demons of the 
South wind, to Africa the wind coming across the desert and 
bringing heat and blight and pestilence’. 

It might be bold to assert so much, but for the existence of 
another vase-painting on a situla from Daphnae (fig. 24), also, 
happily for comparison, in the British Museum* On 
the one side, not figured here, is a winged bearded 
figure ending in a snake, probably Boreas: such a 
snake-tailed Boreas was seen by Pausanias* on the 
chest of Cypselus in the act of seizing Oreithyia. 
There is nothing harsh in the snake tail for Boreas, 
for the winds, as has already been noted (p. 68), were 
regarded as earth-born. Behind Boreas is a plant in 
blossom rising from the ground, a symbol of the vegetation 
nourished by the North wind. On the reverse (fig. 25) is a winged 
figure closely like the left hand genii of the Cyrene cylix, and this 
figure drives in front of it destructive creatures, a locust, the pest 
of the South, two birds of prey attacking a hare, and a third that 
is obviously a vulture. The two representations taken together 
justify us in regarding the left hand genii as destructive. Taking 
these two representations together with a third vase-painting, the 
celebrated Phineus cylix‘, we are further justified in calling these 
destructive wind-demons Harpies. On this vase*® the Boreadae, 
Zetes and Kalais, show their true antagonism. The Harpies have 





Fic. 24, 


1 The full interpretation of the Cyrene vase is due to Mr Cecil Smith, Journal 
of Hellenic Studies p. 103, ‘Harpies in Greek Art.’ The vase is reproduced and 
discussed, but only with partial success, by Dr Studniczka in his Kyrene p. 18. 

2 Cat. B 104. : 

3 P. v.19. 1 Bopéas éoriv pwaxds QpeiOuay, ovpal dé dpewy avi Today eicly airy. 

4+ Wiirzburg, no. 354, 5 Reproduced later, fig. 47. 


182 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  |CH. 


fouled the food of Phineus like the pestilential winds they were, 
and the clean clear sons of the North wind give chase. It is 





Fie. 25. 
seldom that ancient art has preserved for us so clear a picture of 


the duality of things. 


On black-figured vase-paintings little winged figures occur not 
unfrequently to which it is by no means easy to give aname. In 





fig. 26 we have such a representation'—Europa seated on the bull 
passes in rapid flight over the sea which is indicated by fishes and 


1 Cecil Smith, J.H.S. xin. p. 112, fig. 2. 


Vv] 4 “L The Ker as Fate 183 


dolphins. In front of her flies a vulture-like bird, behind comes a 
winged figure holding two wreaths. Is she Nike, bringing good 
success to the lover? is she a favouring wind speeding the flight ? 
I incline to think the vase-painter did not clearly discriminate. 
She is a sort of good Ker, a fostering favouring influence. In all 
these cases of early genii it is important to bear in mind that the 
sharp distinction between moral and physical influence, so natural 
to the modern mind, is not yet established. 
We return to the Keres from which the wind demons sprang. 


THE KER AS FATE. 


One Homeric instance of the use of Ker remains to be ex- 
amined. When Achilles! had the fourth time chased Hector 
round the walls of Troy, Zeus was wearied and 

‘Hung up his golden scales and in them set 

Twain Keres, fates of death that lays men low.’ 
This weighing of Keres, this ‘ Kerostasia,’ is a weighing of death 
fates, but it 1s interesting to find that it reappears under another 
name, i.e. the ‘Psychostasia, the weighing of souls). We know 
from Plutarch? that Aeschylus wrote a play with this title. The 
subject was the weighing of the souls or lives not of Hector 
and Achilles, but Achilles and Memnon. This is certain because, 
Plutarch says, he placed at either side of the scales the mothers 
Thetis and Eos praying for their sons. Pollux? adds that Zeus 
and his attendants were suspended from a crane. In the scene 
of the Kerostasia as given by Quintus Smyrnaeus‘, a scene which 
probably goes back to the earlier tradition of ‘Arctinos, it is 
noticeable that Memnon the loser has a swarthy Ker while Achilles 
the winner has a bright cheerful one, a fact which seems to anti- 
cipate the white and black Erinyes. 

The scene of the Psychostasia or Kerostasia, as it is variously 
called, appears on several vase-paintings, one of which from the 


i Tl. xxi. 208: 2 Plut. Moral. p. 17a. 3 Poll. Onomast. tv. 130. 
4 Post-Hom. 1. 509 
Soval dp’ audorépocr Gedy Exatrepbe Tapécrav 
Kijpes: épeuvain mev €By moti Méuvovos ,jrop 
patdp7n 5 aud’ ’AxirAja datppova. 
Mr T. R. Glover, in the chapter on Quintus Smyrnaeus in his Life and Letters 
in the Fourth Century, points out that the Keres in the poem of Quintus have 
developed a supremacy unknown to Homer, they are é¢vxroi—even the gods cannot 
check them. They are by-forms of Aisa and Moira. 


184 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cu. 


British Museum? is reproduced in fig. 27. Hermes holds the 
scales, in either scale 
is the Ker or etdolon.of 
one of the combatants ; 
the lekythos is black- 
figured, and is our 
earliest source for the 
Kerostasia. The Keres 
or Wuyai are repre- Fie. 27. 

sented as miniature 

men, it is the lives rather than the fates that are weighed. So 
the notion shifts. 

In Hesiod, as has already been noted (p. 169), the Keres are 
more primitive and actual, they are in a sense fates, but they 
are also little winged spirits. But Hesiod is Homer-ridden, so 
we get the ‘black Ker, own sister to Thanatos and hateful Moros 
(Doom) and Sleep and the tribes of Dreams*. We get also* the 
dawnings of an Erinys, of an avenging fate, though the lines look 
like an interpolation: 





‘Night bore 
The Avengers and the Keres pitiless.’ 


Hesiod goes on to give the names usually associated with the 
Fates, Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos, and says they 

‘To mortals at their birth 

Give good and evil both.’ 

Whether interpolated or not the passage is significant both be- 
cause it gives to the Keres the functions Homer allotted to the 
Erinyes, and also because with a reminiscence of earlier thought 
it makes them the source of good and of evil. It is probably this 
last idea that is at the back of the curious Hesiodic epithet 
Kypetpedajs, which occurs in the Works and Days*: 


‘Then, when the dog-star comes and shines by day 
For a brief space over the heads of men 
Ker-nourished.’ 


1 Cat. 8 639; Murray, Hist. of Greek Sculpture vol. 1. p. 28. Dr Murray cites this 
vase as an instance of primitive perspective. Hermes, depicted in an impossible 
position, actually between the two advancing combatants, is thought of as in the 
background. 

2 Hes. Theog. 211. 3 Theog. 217 ft. 

4 Hes. Hrg. 416. The only other passage in which this difficult word oceurs is 
in one of the oracles collected in the cvvaywy/) of Mnaseas (3rd cent. B.c.) and 
preserved for us by the scholiast on the Phoenissae of Euripides (ad v. 638, 





v] The Ker as Fate 185 


‘Men nourished for death’ assuredly is not the meaning; the idea 
seems to be that each man has a Ker within him, a thing that 
nourishes him, keeps him alive, a sort of fate as it were on which 
his life depends. The epithet might come to signify something 
hike mortal, subject to, depending on fate. If this be the meaning 
it looks back to an early stage of things when the Ker had not been 
specialized down to death and was not wholly ‘ black, when it was 
more a man’s luck than his fate, a sort of embryo Genius. 

Kypttpedrjs, Ker-nourished, would then be the antithesis of 
Kynpigatos ‘slain by Keres, which Hesychius! explains as those 
who died of disease ; and would look back to a primitive double- 
- ness of functions when the Keres were demons of all work. In 
vague and fitful fashion they begin where the Semnae magnifi- 
cently end, as Moirae with control over all human weal and woe. 

‘These for their guerdon hold dominion 
O’er all things mortal?’ 


In such returning cycles runs the wheel of theology. 


But the black side of things is always, it would seem, most 
impressive to primitive man. Given that the Ker was a fate of 
death, almost a personified death, it was fitting and natural that 
it should be tricked out with ever increasing horrors. Hesiod, 
or the writer of the Shield, with his rude peasant imagination 
was ready for the task. The Keres of Pandora’s jar are purely 
primitive, and quite natural,’ not thought out at all: the Keres 
of the Shield are a literary effort and much too horrid to be 
frightening. Behind the crowd of old men praying with uplifted 
hands for their fighting children stood 


‘The blue-black Keres, grinding their white teeth, 
Glaring and grim, bloody, insatiable ; 

They strive round those that fall, greedy to drink 
Black blood, and whomsoever first they found 
Low lying with fresh wounds, about his flesh 

A Ker would lay long claws, and his soul pass 
To Hades and chill gloom of Tartarus*’ 


Miiller F.H.G. 3, p. 157) where Kadmos is told to go on ‘till he comes to the herds 
of the Ker-nourished Pelagon’ (xypirpepéos IleXd-yovros). Here it looks as if the epithet 
indicated prosperity, the man nourished and favoured and cherished by the Keres, see 
Roscher, Lexicon s.v. Kadmos, p. 834, and s.v. Keres, p. 1139, but it is possible that, 
as suggested to me by Mr Cornford, the word may have been coined by Hesiod in 
bitter parody of the Homeric Avrpeg¢7s. The notion of the evil wasting action of 
Keres comes out in the word: kypatvw, as in Eur. Hipp. 223 ri mor’, © réxvov, rade 
knpaivers, and more physically in Aesch. Supp. 999 @7jpes d€ Knpaivovct. 

1 Hesych. s.v., 601 véow Tebv7jKacwy. 2 Aesch. Hum. 930. 

° Hes. Scut. 249. 


— 


186 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


Pausanias! in his description of the chest of Cypselus tells 
of the figure of a Ker which is thoroughly Hesiodic in character. 
The scene is the combat between Eteokles and Polyneikes; 
Polyneikes has fallen on his knees and Eteokles is rushing at 
him. ‘Behind Polyneikes is a woman-figure with teeth, as cruel 
as a wild beasts, and(her finger-nails are hooked. ) An inscription 
near her says that she is a Ker, as though Polyneikes were 
carried off by Fate, and as though the end of Eteokles were in 
accordance with justice.’ Pausanias regards the word Ker as 
the equivalent of Fate, but we must not impose a. conception 
so abstract on the primitive artist who decorated the chest. 


We are very far from the little fluttering ghosts, the winged . 


bacilli, but there is a touch of kinship with those other ghosts 
who in the Nekuia draw nigh to drink the black blood (p. 75), 
and—a forecast of the Erinyes—the ‘ blue-black” Keres are near 
akin to the horrid Hades demon painted by Polygnotus on the 
walls of the Lesche at Delphi. Pausanias* says, ‘Above the 
figures I have mentioned (i.e. the sacrilegious man, etc.) is Eury- 
nomos; the guides of Delphi say that Eurynomos is one of the 
demons in Hades, and that he gnaws the flesh of the dead 
bodies, leaving only the bones. Homer’s poem about Odysseus, 
and those called the Minyas and the Nostoz, though they all make 
mention of Hades and its terrors, know no demon Eurynomos. 
I will therefore say this much, I will describe what sort of a person 
Kurynomos is and in what fashion he appears in the painting. The 
colour is blue-black (cvavod tiv ypoav petakd éote Kal pédavos) 
like the colour of the flies that settle on meat; he is showing his 
teeth and is seated on the skin of a vulture. The Keres of the 
Shield are human vultures; Eurynomos is the sarcophagus in- 
carnate, the great carnivorous vulture of the underworld, the flesh- 
eater grotesquely translated to a world of shadows. He rightly 
sits upon a vulture’s skin. Such figures, Pausanias truly observes, 
are foreign to the urbane Epic. But rude primitive man, when 

1 P. v. 19. 6 rob [loAuveixous dé dricOev Eornkev ddbvras Te Exovca ovdev uEpwTépous 
Onptov Kai ol kal rdv xeipav eloly émixapumeis ol dvuxes* émlypaupa 5é éx’ adrp elval 
pnor Kijpa, ws roy pev brd Tod ILerpwuévov rov Iloduvelknvy amraxOévra, ‘HreoxNe? dé 
yevouévns kal oly T@ dikalw Tis TedEUTHs. 

2 Blue-black, cudveos, remained the traditional colour of the underworld, as in the 
Alcestis of Euripides (v. 262) : 

bm’ dppvot Kvavavyéot 


Br\érwv mrepwrbs—t aldas't. 
SAL 3. yes: 


v] The Ker as Gorgon 187 


he sees a skeleton, asks who ate the flesh; the answer is ‘a Ker’ 
We are in the region of mere rude bogeydom, the land of Gorgo, 
Empusa, Lamia and Sphinx, and, strange though it may seem, 
of Siren. 

To examine severally each of these bogey forms would lead 
too far afield, but the development of the types of Gorgon, Siren 
and Sphinx both im art and literature is so instructive that at the 
risk of digression each of these forms must be examined some- 
what in detail. 


THE KER AS GORGON. 


The Gorgons are to the modern mind three sisters of whom 
one, most evil of the three, Medusa, was slain by Perseus, and her 
lovely terrible face had power to turn men into stone. ) 

The triple form is not primitive, it is merely an instance of a 
general tendency, to be discussed later—a tendency which makes 
of each woman-goddess a trinity, which has given us the Horae, 
the Charites, the Semnae, and a host of other triple groups. It is 
immediately obvious that the triple Gorgons are not really three 
but one + two. The two unslain sisters are mere superfluous 
appendages due to convention; the real Gorgon is Medusa. It is 
equally apparent that in her essence Medusa is a head and nothing 
more; her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that 
potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body 
later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there was in his 
ritual a horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with 
glaring eyes and protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. 
How did this Gorgoneion come to be? A hero had slain a beast 
ealled the Gorgon, and this was its head. Though many other 
associations gathered round it, the basis of the Gorgoneion is a 
cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual object 
comes first; then the monster is begotten to account for it; then 
the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster. 

Ritual masks are part of the appliances of most primitive 
cults. They are the natural agents of a religion of fear and 
‘riddance.’ Most anthropological museums! contain specimens 


1 Admirable specimens of savage dancing-masks with Medusa-like tongue and 
tusks are exhibited in the Berlin Museum fiir Vélkerkunde. 


\ 
/ 


188 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


of ‘Gorgoneia’ still in use among savages, Gorgoneia which 
are veritable Medusa heads in every detail, glaring eyes, pendent 
tongue, protruding tusks. The function of such masks is perma- 
nently to ‘make an ugly face, at you if you are doing wrong, 
breaking your word, robbing your neighbour, meeting him in 
battle ; for you if you are doing right. 

Scattered notices show us that masks and faces were part of the 
apparatus of a religion of terror among the Greeks. There was, we 
learn from the lexicographers}, a goddess Praxidike, Exactress of 
Vengeance, whose images were heads only, and her sacrifices the like. 
By the time of Pausanias? this head or mask goddess had, like the 
Erinys, taken on a multiple, probably a triple form. At Haliartos in 
Boeotia he saw in the open air ‘a sanctuary of the goddesses whom 
they call Praxidikae. Here the Haliartans swear, but the oath is not 
one that they take lightly. In lke manner at ancient Pheneus, 
there was a thing called the Petroma*® which contained a mask of 
Demeter with the surname of Cidaria: by this Petroma most of 
the people of Pheneus swore on the most important matters. If the 
mask like its covering were of stone, such a stone-mask may well 
have helped out the legend of Medusa. The mask enclosed in the 
Petroma was the vehicle of the goddess: the priest put it on when 
he performed the ceremony of smiting the Underground Folk with 
rods. 

The use of masks in regular ritual was probably a rare survival, 
and would persist only in remote regions, but the common people 
were slow to lose their faith in the apotropaic virtue of an ‘ugly 
face.’ Fire was a natural terror to primitive man and all operations 
of baking beset by possible Keres. Therefore on his ovens he 
thought it well to set a Gorgon mask. In fig. 28, a portable oven 
now in the museum at Athens‘, the mask is outside guarding the 
entrance. In fig. 29 the upper part of a similar oven is shown, 
and inside, where the fire flames up, are set three masks. These 
ovens are not very early, but they are essentially primitive. The 
face need not be of the type we call a Gorgon. In fig. 30 we have 
a Satyr type, bearded, with stark upstanding ears and hair, the 


1 Hesych. s.v., Photius s.v. 

2 P. vu. 15. 3, see Dr Frazer ad loc. 8 Po vith lero. 

4 For these ovens see Conze, ‘Griechische Kohlenbecken,’ Jahrbuch d. Inst., 
1890, Taf. 1. and 11., and Furtwiingler, op. cit. 1891, p. 110. 


Wy | _ The Ker as Gorgon 189 
{ a. ; 


MUL AUCMMLL ILL ILEE PY hes. 


| 
\ 
\ 





190 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


image of fright set to frighten the frightful. It might be the 
picture of Phobos himself. In fig. 31 we have neither Gorgon 
nor Satyr but that typical bogey of the workshop, the Cyclops. 
He wears the typical workman’s cap, and to either side are set 
the thunderbolts it is his business to forge. The craftsman is 
regarded as an uncanny bogey himself, cunning over-much, often 
deformed, and so he is good to frighten other bogeys. The Cyclops 
was a terror even in high Olympus. Callimachus? in his charming 
way tells how 


‘Even the little goddesses are in a dreadful fright ; 

If one of them will not be good, up in Olympos’ height, 

Her mother calls a Cyclops, and there is sore disgrace, 

And Hermes goes and gets a coal, and blacks his dreadful face, 

And down the chimney comes. She runs straight to her mother’s lap, 
And shuts her eyes tight in her hands for fear of dire mishap.’ 


This fear of the bogey that beset the potter, and indeed beset 
every action, even the simplest, of human life, is very well shown 
in the Hymn? ‘The Oven, or the Potters, which shows clearly the 
order of beings against which the ‘ugly face’ was efficacious: 


‘If you but pay me my hire, potters, I sing to command. 

Hither, come hither, Athene, bless with a fostering hand 

Furnace and potters and pots, let the making and baking go well; 

Fair shall they stand in the streets and the market, and quick shall 
they sell, 

Great be the gain. But if at your peril you cheat me my price, 

Tricksters by birth, then straight to the furnace I call in a trice 

Mischievous imps one and all, Crusher and Crasher by name, 

Smasher and Half-bake and Him-who-burns-with- Unquenchable-Flame, 

They shall scorch up the house and the furnace, ruin it, bring it to nought. 

Wail shall the potters and snort shall the furnace, as horses do snort.’ 


How real was the belief in these evil sprites and in the power to 
avert them by magic and apotropaic figures is seen on a fragment 
of early Corinthian pottery* now in the Berlin Museum reproduced 
in fig. 32. Here is the great oven and here is the potter hard at 
work, but he is afraid in his heart, afraid of the Crusher and the 
Smasher and the rest. He has done what he can; a great owl is 
perched on the oven to protect it, and in front he has put a little 
ugly comic man, a charm to keep off evil spirits: he might have 
put a Satyr-head* or a Gorgoneion ; he often did put both; it is all 

1 Callim. Hym. ad Dian. 67, and see Myths of the Odyssey, p. 26. 

2 Hom. EHpigr. xiv. Kdpuwos 7) Kepapes. 
% Pernice, Mestschrift fiir Benndorf, p. 75. The inscriptions are not yet satis- 


factorily explained. 
4 A satyr-mask on an oven is figured in my Greek Vase-paintings, p. 9, fig. 1. 


y] The Ker as Gorgon 191 


the same. Pollux? tells us it was the custom to put such comic 
figures (yeXo@a) before bronze-foundries ; they could be either hung 
up or modelled on the furnace, and their object was ‘the aversion 
of ill-will’ (é7i $@0vov adrorporyj). These little images were 





Fic. 32. 


also called Bacxavia or by the unlearned rpoBackavia, charms 
against the evil eye; and if we may trust the scholiast on Aris- 
tophanes? they formed part of the furniture of most people’s 
chimney corners at Athens. Of such Bacxavia the Gorgon mask 
was one and perhaps the most common shape. 


In literature the Gorgon first meets us as a Gorgoneion, and 
this Gorgoneion is an underworld bogey. Odysseus* in Hades 
would fain have held further converse with dead heroes, but 


‘Ere that might be, the ghosts thronged round in myriads manifold, be 
Weird was the magic din they made, a pale-green fear gat hold 
Of me, lest for my daring Persephone the dread 

From Hades should send up an awful monster’s grizzly head. o 


1 Poll. On. v1. 108. 2 Schol. ad Ar. Nub. 436. 
3 Od. x1. 633 
éue 6 xAwpov Séos Tpet 
bn po yopyelnv Kepadhy dewvoto mewpov 
é& ’Atdeos méuperey ayavn Iepoediveca. 
I have translated yopyelny ‘grizzly,’ not ‘Gorgon,’ advisedly. Homer does not 
commit himself to a definite Gorgon. Mr Neil on Aristoph. Hq. 1181 says 
“Topyoké@a means merely ‘fierce-plumed.’” Zhe Gorgon was made out of the 
terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon. 


Oe 


_— es 
192 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [OH. 


Homer is quite non-committal as to who and what the awful 
monster is; all that is clear is that the head only is feared as an 
amotpotratov, a bogey to keep you off. Whether he knew of an 
actual monster called a Gorgon is uncertain. The nameless horror 
may be the head of either man or beast, or monster compounded 
of both. 

In this connection it is instructive to note that, though the 
human Medusa-head on the whole obtained, the head of any beast 
is good as a protective charm. Prof. Ridgeway" has conclusively 
shown that the Gorgoneion on the aegis of Athene is but the head 
of the slain beast whose skin was the raiment of the primitive 
goddess; the head is worn on the breast, and serves to protect the 
wearer and to frighten his foe; it isa primitive half-magical shield. 
The natural head is later tricked out into an artificial bogey. 

We are familiar with the Gorgoneion on shields, with the 
Gorgoneion on tombs, and as an amulet on vases. On the basis? 


ee, 





Fie. 33. 


1 J.H.S. xx. 1900, p, xliv. On an askos in the British Museum (Cat. a 80) 
decorated with a stamped relief, a Gorgon’s head is figured with horns and animal 
ears. The head stands above, but separated from, a fantastic body. 

2 Th. Homolle, Bull. de Corr. Hell. x11. 1888, p. 464. 


"p - The Ker as Gorgon 193 


in fig. 33 the Gorgoneion is set to guard a statue of which two 
delicate feet remain. On two sides of the triangular statue we 
have the Gorgon head; on the third, serving a like protective 
purpose, a ram’s head. The statue, dedicated in the precinct of 
Apollo at Delos, probably represents the god himself, but we need 
seek for no artificial connection between Gorgon, rams and Apollo ; 
Gorgoneion and ram alike are merely prophylactic. The basis 
has a further interest in that the inscription! dates the Gorgon- 
type represented with some precision. The form of the letters 
shows it to have been the work and the dedication of a Naxian 
artist of the early part of the 6th century. 

On a Rhodian plate? in the British Museum in fig. 34 the 





1 Filplixapridns | w’alvédexe | ho | Nahovos, see M. Homolle, op. cit. 
2 J.H.S. 1885, Pl. urx. Brit. Mus. Cat. 


H. 13 


194 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [on. 


Gorgoneion has been furnished with a body tricked out with 
wings, but the mask-head is still dominant. The figure is con- 
ceived in the typical heraldic fashion of the Mistress of Wild 
Things (7orva Onpov); she is in fact the ugly bogey-, Erinys- 
side of the Great Mother ; she is a potent goddess, not as in later 
days a monster to be slain by heroes. The highest divinities of 
the religion of fear and riddance became the harmful bogeys of the 
cult of ‘service. The Olympians in their turn became Christian 
devils. 

Aeschylus! in instructive fashion places side by side the two 
sets of three sisters, the Gorgons and the Graiae. They are but 
two by-forms of each other. Prometheus foretells to Io her long 
wandering in the bogey land of Nowhere : 


‘Pass onward o’er the sounding sea, till thou 

Dost touch Kisthene’s dreadful plains, wherein 

The Phorkides do dwell, the ancient maids, 

Three, shaped like swans, having one eye for all, 
One tooth—whom never doth the rising sun 

Glad with his beams, nor yet the moon by night— 
Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged, 
With snakes for hair—hated of mortal man— 
None may behold and bear their breathing blight.’ 

The daughters of Phorkys, whom Hesiod? calls Grey Ones or 
Old Ones, Graiae, are fair of face though two-thirds blind and 
one-toothed; but the emphasis on the one tooth and the one eye 
shows that in tooth and eye resided their potency, and that in this 
they were own sisters to the Gorgons. 

The Graiae appear, so far as I know, only once in vase-paintings, 
on the cover of a pyxis in the Central Museum at Athens’, repro- 
duced in fig. 35. They are sea-maidens, as the dolphins show; 
old Phorkys their father is seated near them, and Poseidon and 
Athene are present in regular Athenian fashion. Hermes has 
brought Perseus, and Perseus waits his chance to get the one 
eye as it is passed from hand to hand. The eye is clearly seen 
in the hand outstretched above Perseus; one blind sister hands it 
to the other. The third holds in her hand the fanged tooth. The 
vase-painter will not have the Graiae old and loathsome, they are 
lovely maidens; he remembers that they were white-haired from 
their youth. 


1 Aesch. Prom. Vinet. 793. 2 Hes. Theog. 270. 
3 Cat. 1956; Ath. Mitt. 1886, Taf. x. 270. 


Vv] The Ker as Gorgon 195 


The account given by Aeschylus of the Gorgons helps to 
explain their nature: 


‘None may behold, and bear their breathing blight!’ 


They slay by a malign etfluence, and this effluence, tradition 
said, came from their eyes. Athenaeus? quotes Alexander the 





Fie. 35. 


Myndian as his authority for the statement that there actually 
existed creatures who could by their eyes turn men to stone. 


1 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 800 ds @vnros ovdeis eicrdav é&er tvods. The line is usually 
rendered ‘no mortal may behold them and live,’ but, in the light of the account of 
Athenaeus, it is clear that the mvoai are the intolerable exhalations, not the breath 
of life. 

2 Athen. v. 64 § 221 xrelver roy im’ adrijs OewpnbévTa, od TH mvebuare Gra TH yeyvo- 
pévyn amd Tis Tay éuudtov dicews Popa Kal vexpov moet. The same account is given 
by Aelian, Hist. An. vir. 5, and Eustathius § 1704 in commenting on Od. x1, 633. 


13—2 


196 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


Some say the beast which the Libyans called Gorgon was like a 
wild sheep, others like a calf; it had a mane hanging over its eyes 
so heavy that it could only shake it aside with difficulty; it killed 
whomever it looked at, not by its breath but by a destructive exha- 
lation from its eyes. 

; What the beast was and how the story arose cannot be decided, 

/ but it is clear that the Gorgon was regarded as a sort of incarnate 

Evil Eye. The monster was tricked out with cruel tusks and 

snakes, but it slew by the eye, it fascinated. 


The Evil Eye itself is not frequent on monuments; the 
Gorgoneion as a more complete and more elaborately decorative 
horror attained a wider popularity. But the prophylactic Eye, 
the eye set to stare back the Evil Eye, is common on vases, 
on shields and on the prows of ships (see fig. 38). The curious 
design in fig. 36 is from a Roman mosaic dug up on the Caelian 


I RANTIBVS'4IC-DEOS 
PROPITIOSET BASILI 
HILARIA NAES 





Fia. 36. 


hill. It served as the pavement in an entrance hall to a Basilica 
built by a certain Hilarius, a dealer in pearls (margaritarius) and 
head of a college of Dendrophoroi, sacred to the Mother of the 

1 Visconti, Bull. de Comm. Arch. 1890, Tav. 1. and um. p. 24. A relief with 


similar design exists on the back of a Corinthian marble in the British Museum: its 
apotropaic functions are fully discussed by Prof. Michaelis, J.H.S. v1. 1885, p. 312. 


v] The Ker as Siren 197 


Gods. The inscription prays that ‘God may be propitious to those 
who enter here and to the Basilica of Hilarius, and to make divine 
favour more secure, a picture is added to show the complete over- 
throw of the evil eye. Very complete is its destruction. Four- 
footed beasts, birds and reptiles attack it, it is bored through with 
a-lance, and as a final prophylactic on the eye-brow is perched 
Athene’s little holy owl. MHilarius prayed to a kindly god, but 
deep down in his heart was the old savage fear’. 


f \ 
The Gorgon is more monstrous, more savage, than any other of | 


the Ker-forms. The Gorgoneion figures little in poetry though 
much in art. It is an underworld bogey but not human enough 
to be a ghost, it lacks wholly the gentle side of the Keres, and 
would scarcely have been discussed here, but that the art-type of 
the Gorgon lent, as will be seen, some of its traits to the Erinys, 
and notably the deathly distillation by which they slay : 


‘From out their eyes they ooze a loathly rheum2,’ 


THE KER AS SIREN*. 


The Sirens are to the modern mind mermaids, sometimes 
all human, sometimes fish-tailed, evil sometimes, but beautiful 
always. Milton invokes Sabrina from the waves by 


‘...the songs of Sirens sweet, 

By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb, 
And fair Ligeia’s golden comb 
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks 
Sleeking her soft alluring locks.’ 


Homer by the magic of his song lifted them once and for all 
out of the region of mere bogeydom, and yet a careful exami- 


1 For the evil eye in Greece see O. Jahn, Berichte d. k. siichs. Ges. d. Wissen- 
schaften, Wien 1855, and P. Perdrizet, Bull. de Corr. Hell. 1900, p. 292, and 
for modern survivals, Tuchmann, Melusine 1885. 

2 Aesch. Hum. 54 ék & éupdrwv delBovor dvopidH dia. Following Dr Verrall, 
I keep the ms. reading, 

3 Since this section was written Dr G. Weicker’s treatise Der Seelenvogel has 
appeared. As the substance of his argument as to the soul-origin of the Sirens had 
been previously published in a dissertation De Sirenibus Quaestiones Selectae 
(Leipzig, 1895) he had long anticipated my view and I welcome this confirmation 
of a theory at which I had independently arrived, a theory which indeed must 
occur to everyone who examines the art-form of the Sirens. I regret that his work 
was known to me too late for me to utilize the vast stores of evidence he has 
accumulated. 


Se 


198 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys (on. 


nation, especially of their art form, clearly reveals traces of rude 
origin. 
Circe’s warning to Odysseus runs thus?: 

‘First to the Sirens shalt thou sail, who all men do beguile. 

Whoso unwitting draws anigh, by magic of their wile, 

They lure him with their singing, nor doth he reach his home 

Nor see his dear wife and his babes, ajoy that he is come. 

For they, the Sirens, lull him with murmur of sweet sound 


Crouching within the meadow: about them is a mound 
Of men that rot in death, their skin wasting the bones around.’ 


Odysseus and his comrades, so forewarned, set sail?: 


‘Then straightway sailed the goodly ship and swift the Sirens’ isle 
Did reach, for that a friendly gale was blowing all the while. 
Forthwith the gale fell dead, and calm held all the heaving deep 
In stillness, for some god had lulled the billows to their sleep.’ 


- The song of the Sirens is heard?: 


‘Hither, far-famed Odysseus, come hither, thou the boast 
Of all Achaean men, beach thou thy bark upon our coast, 
/ And hearken to our singing, for never but did stay 
| A hero in his black ship and listened to the lay 
/ Of our sweet lips; full many a thing he knew and sailed away. 
For we know all things whatsoe’er in Troy’s wide land had birth 
And we know all things that shall be upon the fruitful earth.’ 

It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the 
Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh. To primitive man, 
Greek or Semite, the desire to know—to be as the gods—was 
~ \ the fatal desire. 

Homer takes his Sirens as already familiar; he clearly draws 
from popular tradition. There is no word as to their form, no 
hint of parentage: he does not mean them to be mysterious, but 
by a fortunate chance he leaves them shrouded in mystery, the 
mystery of the hidden spell of the sea, with the haze of the noon- 
tide about them and the meshes of sweet music for their unseen 
toils—knowing all things yet for ever unknown. It is this 
mystery of the Sirens that has appealed to modern poetry and 
almost wholly obscured their simple primitive significance. 

‘Their words are no more heard aright 
Through lapse of many ages, and no man 
Can any more across the waters wan 
Behold these singing women of the sea.’ 


Four points in the story of Homer must be clearly noted. The 


1 Od, x11, 39. 2 Od, x11. 166. 3 Od. xm. 184. 


v] The Ker as Siren 199 


Sirens, though they sing to mariners, are not sea-maidens; they 
dwell on an island in a flowery meadow. They are mantic 
creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common, 
knowing both the past and the future. Their song takes effect 
at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death. It 
is only from the warning of Circe that we know of the heap 
of bones, corrupt in death—horror is Reps in the background, 
seduction to the fore. 


It is to art we must turn to know the real nature of the 
Sirens. Ancient art, like ancient literature, knows nothing of the 
fish-tailed mermaid. Uniformly the art-form of the Siren is that 
of the bird-woman. The proportion of bird to woman varies, but 
the bird element is constant. It is interesting to note that, 
though the bird-woman is gradually ousted in modern art. by the 
fish-tailed mermaid, the bird element survives in mediaeval times?. 
In the Hortus Deliciarwm of the Abbess Herrad (cire. A.D. 1160), 
the Sirens appear as draped women with the clawed feet of birds; 
with their human hands they are playing on lyres. 

The bird form of the Sirens was a problem even tv the 
ancients. Ovid? asks: 

“Whence came these feathers and these feet of birds ? 

Your faces are the faces of fair maids.’ 
Ovid's aetiology is of course beside the mark. The answer to his 
pertinent question is quite simple. The Sirens belong to the same 
order of bogey beings as the Sphinx and the Harpy ; the monstrous 
form expresses the monstrous nature; they are birds of prey but 
with power to lure by their song. In the Harpy-form the ravening 
snatching nature is emphasized and developed, in the Sphinx the 
mantic power of all uncanny beings, in the Siren the seduction of 
song. The Sphinx, though mainly a prophetess, keeps Harpy 
elements; she snatches away the youths of Thebes: she is but 


1 Mediaeval Sirens are more fully discussed in my Myths of the Odyssey, p. 172. 
2 Met. v. 552 
vobis Acheloides unde 
pluma pedesque avium cum virginis ora geratis? 
Apollonius Rhodius also believes that the bird form was a metamorphosis. Argon. 
ty. 898 
Tote 6° dddo pev olwvotcw 
GAXo 6€ mapPevKys évadiyKar écxov ldécPar. 


200 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


‘a man-seizing Ker!’ The Siren too, though mainly a seductive 
singer, is at heart a Harpy, a bird of prey. 

This comes out very clearly in representations on vase-paintings. 
A black-figured aryballos? of Corinthian style (fig. 37), now in the 
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is our earliest artistic source for the 





Siren myth. Odysseus, bound to the mast, has come close up to 
the island: on the island are perched ‘Sirens twain.’ Above the 
ship hover two great black birds of prey in act to pounce on the 
mariners. These birds cannot be merely decorative: they in a 
sense duplicate the Sirens. The vase-painter knows the Sirens 
are singing demons sitting on an island; the text of Homer was 
not in his hands to examine the account word by word, but 
the Homeric story haunts his memory. He knows too that in 
popular belief the Sirens are demons of prey; hence the great 
birds. To the right of the Sirens on the island crouches a third 
- figure; she is all human, not a third Siren. She probably, indeed 
all but certainly, represents the mother of the Sirens, Chthon, the 
Earth. Euripides? makes his Helen in her anguish call on the 

‘Winged maidens, virgins, daughters of the Earth, 

The Sirens,’ 
to join their sorrowful song to hers. The parentage is significant. 
The Sirens are not of the sea, not even of the land, but demons of 
the underworld ; they are in fact a by-form of Keres, souls. 


The notion of the soul as a human-faced bird is familiar in 
Egyptian, but rare in Greek, art. The only certain instance is, 


1 Aesch. Sept. 776. The nature of the Sphinx as a mantic earth-demon will be 
discussed in detail later (p. 207). 

2 Published and discussed by H. Bulle, Strena Helbigiana, p. 31. Recently 
acquired for the Boston Museum, see 7'wenty-sixth Annual Report of Boston Museum 
of Fine Arts, Dec. 31, 1901, p. 35, 

® Kur. Hel. 167. 


v] The Ker as Siren 201 


so far as I know, the vase in the British Museum! on which is 
represented the death of Procris. Above Procris falling in death 
hovers a winged bird-woman. She is clearly, I think, the soul of 
Procris. To conceive of the soul as a bird escaping from the mouth 
is a fancy so natural and beautiful that it has arisen among many 
peoples. In Celtic mythology? Maildun, the Irish Odysseus, comes 
to an island with trees on it in clusters on which were perched 
many birds. The aged man of the island tells him, ‘ These are the 
souls of my children and of all my descendants, both men and 
women, who are sent to this little island to abide with me ac- 
_ cording as they die in Erin.’ Sailors to this day believe that 
sea-mews are the souls of their drowned comrades. Antoninus 
Liberalis® tells how, when Ktesulla because of her father’s broken 
oath died in child-bed, ‘they carried her body out to be buried, 
and from the bier a dove flew forth and the body of Ktesulla 
disappeared.’ 

The persistent anthropomorphism of the Greeks stripped the 
bird-soul of all but its wings. The human winged eidolon 
prevailed in art: the bird-woman became a death-demon, a soul 
sent to fetch a soul, a Ker that lures a soul, a Siren. 

Later in date and somewhat different in conception is the 
scene on a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum? (fig. 38). 
The artist’s desire for a balanced design has made him draw two 
islands, on each of which a Siren is perched. Over the head of 
one is inscribed ‘Ipe(p)o7ra ‘lovely-voiced. A third Siren flies or 
rather falls headlong down on to the ship. The drawing of the 
eye of this third Siren should be noted. The eye is indicated by 
two strokes only, without the pupil. This is the regular method 
of representing the sightless eye, i.e. the eye in death or sleep or 
blindness. The third Siren is dying; she has hurled herself from 
the rock in despair at the fortitude of Odysseus. This is clearly 


1 Cat. © 477. The vase is a kelebe of late style with columnar handles. In 
previously discussing this design (Myths of the Odyssey, p. 158, pl. 40 and Myth. 
and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. \xix, fig. 14) I felt uncertain whether the bird- 
woman were Harpy, Siren, or Soul, Iam now convinced that a soul is intended, and 
that the bird form was probably borrowed from Egypt: see Book of the Dead, 
Vignette xct. 

2 See Myths of the Odyssey, p. 180. 

3 Anton, Lib. 1. I owe this reference to Prof. Sam. Wide, 4. Witt. xxvr. 1901, 
2, p. 155. At the miracle plays it was a custom to let a bird fly when a person 
died—a crow for the impenitent thief and a white dove for the penitent one. See 
Mr Hugh Stewart, Boethius, p. 187. 

4 B.M. Cat. 440. Monimenti del? Inst. vol. 1. pl. 8. 


202. Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  {cuH. 


what the artist wishes to say, but he may have been haunted by 
an artistic tradition of the pouncing bird of prey. He also has 
adopted the number three, which by his time was canonical for 
the Sirens. By making the third Siren fly headlong between the 
two others he has neatly turned a difficulty in composition. On 










aoe : 
fas "sles peer 
ATA 


Fic. 38. 


the reverse of this vase are three Love-gods, who fall to be dis- 
cussed later (Chap. x11.). Connections between the subject matter 
of the obverse and reverse of vases are somewhat precarious, but 
it is likely, as the three Love-gods are flying over the sea, that 
the vase-painter intended to emphasize the seduction of love in 
his Sirens. 


The clearest light on the lower nature of the Sirens is thrown 
by the design in fig. 39 from a Hellenistic relief. The monu- 
ment is of course a late one, later by at least two centuries than 
the vase-paintings, but it reflects a primitive stage of thought 
and one moreover wholly free from the influence of Homer. The 
scene is a rural one. In the right-hand corner is a herm, in 

1 Published by Schreiber, Hellenistische Reliefbilder, Taf. ux1.: where the relief 
now is is not known, Fully discussed by Dr Otto Crusius, ‘Die Epiphanie der 
Sirene,’ Philologos (N.F. tv.) p. 93. Dr Crusius rightly observes that the relief 


has been misunderstood. It represents rather an épodos than a o’jumdeyua, and the 
recumbent figure is a mortal man not a Silen. 


EE 


Vv] The Ker as Siren 203 


front of it an altar, near at hand a tree on which hangs a votive 
syrinx. Some peasant or possibly a wayfarer has fallen asleep. 
Down upon him has pounced 
a winged and_bird-footed 
woman. It is the very image 
of obsession, of nightmare, of 
a haunting midday dream. 
The woman can be none other 
than an evil Siren. Had the 
scene been represented by an 
earlier artist, he would have 
made her ugly because evil; 
but by Hellenistic times the 
Sirens were beautiful women, 
all human but for wings and 
sometimes bird-feet. Fie. 39. 

The terrors of the midday 
sleep were well known to the Greeks in their sun-smitten land ; 
nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation, coupled 
possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the 
obsession of a demon!. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream 
was the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are 
becalmed and the passions unchained. That the midday night- 
mare went to the making of the Siren is clear from the windless 
calm and the heat of the sun in Homer. The horrid end, the 
wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the loss of wife and 
babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some blend 
of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea, 
thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept 
certain horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a 
hetaira disallowing the lawful gifts of Aphrodite. 

There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear 
frequently as monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. 
Here all the erotic element has disappeared; they are substantially 





1 Pliny cites Dinon as authority for a like superstition in India. Nat. Hist. x. 
49 (F.H.G. 11. p.90) : Nec Sirenes impetraverunt fidem adfirmet licet Dinon Clitarchi 
celebrati auctoris pater in India esse mulcerique earum cantu quos gravatos somno 
lacerent. And cf. Aelian H.A. xv. 22, 23. Siren in the Septuagint is the word 
used of the desert bogey that our translation renders ‘dragon,’ Job xxx. 30 ‘I am 
brother to the dragon and companion to owls,’ and again Micah i. 8 ‘I will make 
a wailing like the dragon and a mourning as the owls.’ 


204. Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys (CH. 


Death-Keres, Harpies, though to begin with they imaged the soul 
itself. The bird-woman of the Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of 
death, has been already noted (p.177). The Siren on a black-figured 
lekythos in the British Museum? (fig. 40) is purely monumental. 








Fic. 40. 


She stands on the grave stele playing her great lyre, while two 
bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She is grave 
and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the 
Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, a mpoBacKavior, a 
soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with 
apotropaic ritual (p. 196), that the charm itself is used as counter- 
charm. So the dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the 
tomb. Other associations would gather round. The Siren was a 
singer, she would chant the funeral dirge; this dirge might be the 
praises of the dead. The epitaph that Erinna’ wrote for her girl- 
friend Baukis begins 


‘Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.’ 


On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part 
as mourners, tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic 
function was wholly forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is 
wanted we find an owl or a sphinx. 

Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either 
soul or Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as 
sweet singer. Once, however, when she appears in philosophy, 
there is at least a haunting remembrance that she is a soul who 


1 B.M. Cat.p 651. J. EH. Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey, Pl. 39. 
* Krinna, frg. 5 Drada cal Leiphves eual xal wévOiwe kpwooe. 


v] The Ker as Siren 205 


sings to souls. In the cosmography with which he ends the 
Republic, Plato* thus writes: ‘The spindle turns on the knees of 
Ananke, and on the upper surface of each sphere is perched 
a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single tone. 
The eight together form one Harmony. Commentators explain 
that the Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but 
then, if music be all, why is it the evil Sirens and not the good 
Muses who chant the music of the spheres? Plutarch? felt the 
difficulty. In his Symposiacs he makes one of the guests say: 
‘Plato is absurd in committing the eternal and divine revolutions 
not to the Muses but to the Sirens; demons who are by no 
means either benevolent or in themselves good.’ Another guest, 
Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving 
to them in Homer a mystical significance. ‘Even Homer,’ he says, 
‘means by their music not a power dangerous and destructive to 
man, but rather a power that inspires in the souls that go from 
Hence Thither, and wander about after death, a love for things 
heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness of things mortal, and 
thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even here,’ he goes on 
to say, ‘a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing remi- 
niscence.’ 

It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer’s Sirens had 
really any such mystical content. But, given that they have the 
bird-form of souls, that they ‘know all things, are sweet singers 
and dwellers in Hades, and they lie ready to the hand of the 
mystic. Proclus* in his commentary on the Republic says, with 
perhaps more truth than he is conscious of, ‘the Sirens are a kind 
of souls living the life of the spirit. His interpretation is not 
merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive tradition with mystical 
philosophy. 

The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the 
spheres by the Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, 
nay even became stars. In the Peace of Aristophanes* the servant 
asks Trygaeus, 

‘It is true then, what they say, that in the air 


A man becomes a star, when he comes to die?’ 


1 Plat. Rep. 6178. 2 Plut. Symp. 1x. 14. 6. 
3 Procl. ad Plat. Rep. loc. cit. puxal rwes voeps (Oca. 
4 Ar. Pax 832. For this Orphic doctrine see Rohde, Psyche u. p. 4234, 


Dieterich, Nekuia, pp. 104 ff. 


206 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys (CH. 


To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free: 


‘Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding, 
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod, 
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding, 
As a bird among the bird-droves of God+’ 


And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of 
a Siren : 
‘With golden wings begirt my body flies, 
Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet, 
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet 
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies?’ 

But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the 
Siren, ‘half-angel and half-bird, to cosmic functions, yet, to the 
popular mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet 
fearful and to be shunned. This is seen in the myth of their 
contest with the Muses’. Here they are the spirits of forbidden 
intoxication; as such on vases they join the motley crew of 
Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos. They stand, it 
would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the impulses in 
life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of 
love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling toa man from his 
‘Land of Heart’s Desire’ and to which if he hearken it may be he 
will return home no more—voices too, which, whether a man sail 
by or stay to hearken, still sing on. 

The Siren bird-woman transformed for ever by the genius of 
Homer into the sweet-voiced demon of seduction may seem re- 
mote from the Ker of which she is but a specialized form. A 
curious design‘ on a black-figured cylix in the Louvre (fig. 41) 
shows how close was the real connection. The scene is a banquet: 
five men are reclining on couches, two of them separated by a 
huge deinos, a wine-vessel, from which a boy has drawn wine in an 
oinochoe. Over two of the men are hovering winged figures, each 
holding a crown and a spray; over two others hover bird-women, 
each also holding a crown and a spray. What are we to call these 
ministrant figures, what would the vase-painter himself have called 
them? Are the human winged figures Love-gods, are the bird- 
women Sirens? For lack of context it is hard to say with certainty. 
Thus much is clear, both kinds of figures are favouring geni of 


1 Kur. Hipp. 732. 2 Eur. frg. 911. 3 Myths of the Odyssey, p. 166. 
4 Bull. de Corr. Hell. 1898, p. 238, fig, 6. 


v| The Ker as Sphinx 207 


the feast, and for our purpose this is all-important: the bird- 
women, be they Sirens or not, and the winged human figures, be 
they Love-gods or merely Keres, perform the sume function. The 


RSE : a & 
BIE Meni 
4 Eos 


Wage, 





Date Zl, 


development of the Love-god, Eros, from the Ker will be discussed 
later (Chap. x11.); for the present it is best to regard these bird- 
women and winged sprites as both of the order of Keres, as yet 
unspecialized in function. 


THE KER AS SPHINX. 


Two special features characterize the Sphinx: she was a Harpy 
carrying off men to destruction, an incarnate plague; she was the 
soothsayer with the evil habit of asking riddles as well as answering 
them. Both functions, though seemingly alien, were characteristic 
of underworld bogeys; the myth-making mind put them together 
and wove out of the two the tale of the unanswered riddle and the 
consequent deathly pest. 

On the vase-painting in fig. 42 from a cylix! in the Museo Gre- 
goriano of the Vatican, we have a charming representation of the 
riddle-answering Oedipus, whose name is written Ordipodes, sitting 


1 Mus. Greg. No. 186. Hartwig, Meisterschalen, Taf. Lxx1u1. 


208 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


meditating in front of the oracle. The Sphinx on her column is half 
monument, half personality; she is a very human monster, she has 
her lion-body, but she is a lovely attentive maiden. From her lips 
come the letters xa: tp, which may mean and three or and three 
(-footed). In the field is a delicate decorative spray, which, occur- 
ring as it does on vases with a certain individuality of drawing, 
seems to be, as it were, the signature of a particular master’. 





The Sphinx in fig, 42 is all oracular, but occasionally, on vases 
of the same date, she appears in her other function as the ‘man- 
snatching Ker.’ She leaves her pedestal and carries off a Theban 
youth. The 5th century vase-painter with his determined euphe- 
mism, even when he depicts her carrying off her prey, makes her 
do it with a certain Attic gentleness, more like a death-Siren than 


1 Dr Hartwig op. cit. has collected and discussed these vases and gives to the 
artist the name ‘ Meister mit dem Ranke.’ 


vi The Ker as Sphinx 209 


a Harpy. Aeschylus’ in the Seven against Thebes describes her as 
the monster she is; the Sphinx on the shield of Parthenopaeus is a 
horrid bogey, the ‘reproach of the state, ‘eater of raw-flesh,’ with 
hungry jaws, bringing ill-luck to him who bears her on his ensign. 

In the curious vase-painting in fig. 43, a design from a late 
Lower Italy krater® in the museum at Naples, the Sphinx is wholly 





oracular, and this time she must answer the riddle, not ask it. 
The Sphinx is seated on a rocky mound, near which stands erect 
a snake. The snake is not, I think, without meaning; it is the 
oracular beast of the earth-oracle. The Silenus who has come to 
consult the oracle holds in his hand a bird. The scene would be 
hopelessly enigmatic but for one of the fables that are current 
under the name of Aesop’, which precisely describes the situation. 
‘A certain bad man made an agreement with some one to prove 
that the Delphic oracle was false, and when the appointed day 
came, he took a sparrow in his hand and covered it with his 
garment and came to the sanctuary, and standing in front of the 
oracle, asked whether the thing in his hand was alive or dead, and 

1 Aesch. Sept. c. Thed. 539. 

2 Heydemann, Cat. No. 2846. Museo Borbonico x11. 9. Discussed and explained 
by Dr Otto Crusius, Festschrift fiir Overbeck, p. 102. Dr Crusius holds that the 


snake is merely a ‘ Fiillfigur.’ 
3 Aesop. Fab. 55. 


H. I4 


210 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [0Ou. 


he meant if the oracle said it was dead, to show the sparrow alive, 
but if the oracle said it was alive, to strangle it first and then 
show it. But the god knew his wicked plan, and said to him, 
‘‘ Have done, for it depends on you whether what you hold is dead 
or living.” The story shows plainly that the divinity is not lightly 
to be tempted.’ 
The story, taken in conjunction with the vase-painting it 
explains, shows clearly another thing. The Sphinx was mainly 
a local Theban bogey, but she became the symbol of oracular 
divinity. At Delphi there was an earth-oracle guarded by a 
snake, and in honour of that earth-oracle the Naxians upreared 
their colossal Sphinx? and set it in the precinct of Gaia. As time 
went on, the savage ‘man-snatching’ aspect of the Sphinx faded, 
remembered only in the local legend, while her oracular aspect 
grew ; but the local legend is here as always the more instructive. 
The next representation of the Sphinx (fig. 44), from the frag- 
ment of an oinochoe in the 
Berlin Museum ’,is specially 
suggestive. The monster is 
inscribed, not with the name 
we know her by, ‘Sphinx,’ 
but as ‘ Kassmia,’ the Kad- 
mean One, the bogey of 
Kadmos. The bearded mon- 
ster with wings and claws 
and dog-like head has lost 
her orthodox lion-body, and 
lent it perhaps to Oedipus 
who stands in front of her. 
The scene is of course pure 
comedy, and shows how Fic. 44, 
near to the Greek mind 
were the horrible and the grotesque, the thing feared and the 
thing scoffed at. The Kassmia, the bogey of Kadmos, may have 
brought her lion-body with Kadmos from the East, but the sup- 
position, though very possible, is not necessary. Cithaeron was 





1 Discovered in the excavations at Delphi, see Homolle, Fouilles de Delphes, 1902, 
AN She olkpe one : 
2 Berlin, Inv. 3186. Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, Anzeiger, p. 119, fig. 17. 


Vv] The Ker as Sphinx 211 


traditionally lion-haunted'. The Sphinx may have borrowed some 
of her traits and part of her body from a real lion haunting a real 
local tomb. 

It is worth noting in this connection that Hesiod? calls the 
monster not Sphinx but Phix: 


‘By stress of Orthios, she, Echidna, bare 
Disastrous Phix, a bane to Kadmos’ folk.’ 

The scholiast remarks that ‘Mount Phikion where she dwelt 
was called after her,’ but the reverse is probably true. Phix was 
the local bogey of Phikion. The rocky mountain which rises to 
the S.-E. corner of Lake Copais is still locally known as Phaga’*. 
By a slight and easy modification Phix became Sphix or Sphinx, 
the ‘throttler, an excellent name for a destructive bogey. 

The last representation of the Sphinx, in fig. 45, brings us to 
her characteristic as tomb-haunter. The design is from a krater* 





~—~ 
Ak 


wl 


Hele 
aA 


‘ 
D een aa : 
2 A? y 
b> ZX Jn K 
a _ = = z. 
Sh “ a 
4 ‘ - : = 





Fic. 45. 


in the Vagnonville Collection of the Museo Greco Etrusco at 
Florence. The Sphinx is seated on a tomb-mound (yaya yijs) 
of the regular sepulchral type. That the mound is sepulchral 
is certain from the artificial stone basis pierced with holes’ on 
which it stands. Two lawless Satyrs attack the mound with 
picks. The Sphinx is a tomb-haunting bogey, a Ker, but ulti- 

cokers 4s 4, 2 Hes. Theog. 326 and Scut. Her. 33, and see Plat. Crat. 414. 

3 Dr Frazer ad P. rx, 26. 2. 2 

4 Milani, Museo Topograjico, p. 69. ‘Delphika,’ J.H.S. 1899, p. 235. 


5 The purpose of these holes, which occur frequently in representations of tomb- 
mounds on Athenian lekythoi, is not, so far as I know, made out. 


14—2 


212 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  {0OH. 


mately she fades into a decorative tomb monument, with always 
perhaps some prophylactic intent. In this, as in her mantic 
aspect, she is own cousin to the Ker-Siren, but with the Sphinx 
the mantic side predominates. The Sphinx, unlike the Siren, 
never developed into a trinity, though when she became decorative 
she is doubled for heraldic purposes. 


It is time to resume the various shifting notions that cluster 
round the term Ker, perhaps the most untranslateable of all 
Greek words. Ghost, bacillus, disease, death-angel, death-fate, fate, 
bogey, magician have all gone to the making of it. So shifting 
and various is the notion that it is hard to say what is primary, 
what developed, but deep down in the lowest stratum le the two 
kindred conceptions of ghost and bacillus. It is only by a severe 
effort of the imagination that we can think ourselves back into an 
adequate mental confusion to realize all the connotations of Ker. 

When the lexicographers came to define the word they had 
no easy task. Their struggles—they are honest men, if not too 
intelligent—are instructive. Happily they make no attempt at 
real formulation, but jot things down as they come. Hesychius, 
after his preliminary statement ‘«np (neuter, with circumflex accent) 
the soul, (oxytone, feminine) death-bringing fate, death, gives us 
suggestive particulars: xjpas: axafapaias, wodkicuata, Baas, 
where we see the unclean bacilli; «npdv: Nerrov voonpor, which 
reminds us of the evil skinny Ker of the vase-painting (fig. 17); 
Knprovaba: éxmdntTecAa, where the bogey Ker is manifest; 
KnpiwOjvar* UTd cKoTodivod AnPOyjvat, where the whirlwind seems 
indicated, though it may be the dizziness of death. Kerukainae 
were the female correlatives of Kerykes, ‘women whose business 
it was to collect things polluted’ and carry them off to the sea’. 
Most curious and primitive of all, we are told? that «puxes itself 
means not only messengers, ministers, a priestly race descended 
from Hermes, but ‘they call the insects that impregnate the wild 
fig xjpuxas. Here are bacilli indeed, but for life not for death. 


1 Suidas s.v., kal xnpuxalyas éxddouv ’ANekavdpets yuvatkas, alrives els Tas avAds 
maptovoa Kal Tas cuvoiklas €p’ wre cvvayelpew TA pudopara Kal dropépew els OdNaccay 
amep €xddouv puddKia. 

2 Hesych. s.v., cal rods épuwdfovras rods éplvous knpuKas Né-youct. 


Vv] The Ker as Erinys 213 


THE KER AS ERINYS. 


It has been already indicated that a Ker is sometimes an 
avenger, but this aspect of the word has been advisedly reserved 
because it takes us straight to the idea of the Erinys. 

-Pausanias’, @ propos of the grave of Koroibos at Megara, tells 
us a story in which a Ker figures plainly as an Erinys, with a touch 
of the Sphinx and of the death-Siren. Psamathe, daughter of 
Krotopos, King of Argos, had a child by Apollo, which, fearing 
her father’s anger, she exposed. The child was found and killed 
by the sheep-dogs of Krotopos. Apollo sent Poine (Penalty or 
Vengeance) on the city of the Argives. Poine, they say, snatched 
children from their mothers until Koroibos, to please the Argives, 
slew her. After he had slain her, there came a second pestilence 
upon them and lasted on. Koroibos had to go to Delphi to expiate 
his sin; he was ordered to build a temple of Apollo wherever the 
_ tripod he brought from Delphi should fall. He built of course the 
town of Tripodisci. The grave of Koroibos at Megara was sur- 
mounted by the most ancient Greek stone images Pausanias 
had ever seen, a figure of Koroibos slaying Poine. There were 
elegiac verses carved on it recounting the tale of Psamathe and 
Koroibos. Now Pausanias mentions no Ker, only Poine; but the 
Anthologists* have preserved for us verses which, if not actually 
those carved on the grave, at all events refer to it, and in them 
occur the notable words: 


‘T am the Ker, slain by Koroibos, I dwell on his tomb, 
Here at my feet, on account of the tripod, he lies for his doom.’ 


Poine is clearly the avenging ghost of the child of Psamathe 
causing a pest which snatched babes from their mother, and Poine 
the ghost-pest is a Ker and practically a Ker-Erinys. 

The simple truth emerges so clearly as to be almost self- 
evident, yet is constantly ignored, that primarily the Keres-Erinyes 
are just what the words say, the ‘Keres Angry-ones. There is no 
reason to doubt the truth of what Pausanias® tells us, that the 


Hoe Ber 
2 Anthol. Pal. vu. 154 
Hil 6€ Kijp tupBodxos, 6 dé Krelvas we KéporBos 
Ketrat 0 WO’ bm’ émots tocol dia Tpimoda. 
3 P, yin. 25. 4 bre 7H Ouugs xpjobar Kadodow épivveww ol ’Apkddes. 


214 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [OH. 


Arcadians and, with the Arcadians, probably the rest of the primi- 
tive Greeks, called ‘being in a rage’ épivderv. Demeter at Thelpusa 
had two surnames and even two statues. When she was wroth 
they called her Hrinys1 on account of her wrath, when she relented 
and bathed they called her Lousia. Pausanias gives as literary 
authority for the surname Erinys, Antimachus who wrote (4th 
cent. B.c.) of the expedition of the Argives against Thebes. 

The Erinyes, on this showing, are one form of the countless host 
of divine beings whose names are simply adjectival epithets, not 
names proper. Such others are the Eumenides the Kindly Ones, 
the Potniae the Awful Ones, the Maniae the Madnesses, the 
Praxidikae the Vengeful Ones. With a certain delicate shyness, 
founded possibly on a very practical fear, primitive man will not 
address his gods by a personal name; he decently shrouds them 
in class epithets.. There are people living now, Celts for the most 
part, who shrink from the personal attack of a proper name, and 
call their friends, in true primitive fashion, the Old One, the Kind 
One, the Blackest One, and the like. 

It is apparent that, given these adjectival names, the gods are 
as many as the moods of the worshipper, 1.e. as his thoughts about 
his gods. If he is kind, they are Kindly Ones; when he feels venge- 
ful, they are Vengeful Ones. 


The question arises, why did the angry aspect of the Keres, 
ie. the Erinyes, attain to a development so paramount, so self- 
sufficing, that already in Homer they are distinct from the Keres, 
with functions, if not forms, clearly defined, beyond possibility of 
confusion. It is precisely these functions that have defined them. 
A Ker, as has been seen, is for good and for evil, is active for 
plants, for animals, as for men: a Ker when angry is Erinys: a Ker 
is never so angry as when he has been killed. The idea of Erinys 
as distinct from Ker is developed out of a hwman relation intensely 
felt. The Erinys primarily is the Ker of a human being un- 
righteously slain. Erinys is not death; it is the outraged soul 
of the dead man crying for vengeance; it is the Ker as Poine. 
In discussing the Keres it has been abundantly shown that ghost 


1 The explanation of Erinyes as ‘angry ones’ is confirmed by modern philology. 
F. Froehde, Bezzenberger. Beitriige, xx. p. 188, derives the word Erinys from 
é-pvo-vos, Lith. rustas, angry. 


v] The Ker as Erinys 215 


is a word too narrow: Keres denote a wider animism. With 
Erinys the case is otherwise: the Erinyes are primarily human 
ghosts, but all human ghosts are not Erinyes, only those ghosts 
that are angry, and that for a special reason, usually because they 
have been murdered. Other cases of angry ghosts are covered 
by the black Ker. It is the vengeful inhumanity of the Erinyes, 
arising as it does from their humanity, which marks them out 
from the Keres. 

That the Erinyes are primarily the vengeful souls of murdered 
men can and will in the sequel be plainly shown, but it would be idle 
to deny that already in Homer they have passed out of this stage 
and are personified almost beyond recognition. They are no longer 
souls; they are the avengers of souls. Thus in Homer, in the 
prayer of Althaea, Erinys’, though summoned to avenge the 
death of Althaea’s brethren, is clearly not the ghost of either of 
them; she is one, they are two; she is female, they are male. 
Althaea prays: 


‘And her the Erinys blood-haunting? 
Heard out of Erebos’ depths, she of the soul without pity.’ 


There is nothing that so speedily blurs and effaces the real 
origin of things as this insistent Greek habit of impersonation. | 
We were able to track the Keres back to something like their 
origin just because they never really got personified. In this 
respect poets are the worst of mythological offenders. By their 
intense realization they lose all touch with the confusions of 
actuality. The Erinyes summoned by Althaea were really ghosts 
of the murdered brothers, but Homer separates them off into 
avengers. 


Dt: tx. STL Tis 6° jepopoiris ’Hpuvis 

éxdvev €& ’EpéBeoduy dyeldxov Hrop exovoa. 

2 On the epithet jepodotris ‘ blood-haunting,’ usually translated ‘walking in dark- 
ness,’ Roscher (Myth. Lex. s.v.) has based a whole mistaken theory of the nature of 
the Erinyes as ‘storm-clouds.’ The Townley scholicn (ad loc.) offers an alternative 
reading of the epithet more consonant with the nature of the Krinys: oi d€ etapow&rts, 
éyxetmévou Tov clap Omep éott kara Ladapwiovs aiua. On this showing the Erinyes 
would be not those who ‘walked in darkness’ but those who sucked the blood, 
a view certainly consonant with the picture of the Erinyes presented by Aeschylus: 
dad SGvros popetv épvOpov éx pehéwy médravoy (Hum. 264). The termination -rwris 
instead of -oris gives of course a simple and satisfactory meaning ; but, accepting 
hepo- as representing the Cyprian form cfap ‘blood,’ it is perhaps possible to retain 
-ports and explain the epithet as ‘blood haunting.’ Another alternative is suggested 
by Fick, ice. that the primitive form is japo-roiris ‘blutrachend,’ rotris being akin 
to mow%, cf, Apollo Poitios (see A. Fick, ‘ Gétternamen,’ in Bezzenberger. Beitrage, 
Kes 79) 


216 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


In other Homeric Erinyes there is often not even a fond of 
possible ghosts. Phoenix transgresses against his father Amyntor’, 
and Amyntor for his unnatural offence invokes against him the 
‘hateful Erinyes’: they are no ancestral ghosts, they are merely 
avengers of the moral law, vaguer equivalents of ‘ Underworld 
Zeus and dread Persephone.’ Ares?® offends his mother Aphrodite, 
who is certainly not dead and has no ghost, and the wounds 
inflicted on him by Athene appease the ‘Erinys of his mother.’ 
In a word, in Homer, as has frequently been pointed out, the 
Erinyes are avengers of offences against blood-relations on the 
mother’s and father’s side, of all offences against moral, and finally 
even natural law. 

The familiar case of Xanthus, the horse of Achilles*, marks the 
furthest pole of complete abstraction. Xanthus warns Achilles 
that, for all their fleetness, his horses bear him to his death, and 

‘When he thus had spoken 
The Erinyes stayed his voice.’ 

The intervention of the Erinyes here is usually explained by a 
reference to the saying of Heracleitus* that ‘the sun could not go 
out of his course without the Erinyes, ministers of justice, finding 
him out. I doubt ifthe philosophy of Heracleitus supplies the true 
explanation. The horse speaks as the mouthpiece of the fates, the 
Erinyes ; they tell of what fate (wotpa) will accomplish ; nay more, 
as fates they, reluctant but obedient, carry him to his death. 
When Xanthus has uttered the mandate of fate, the Fates close 
his mouth, not because he transgresses their law, but because he 
has uttered it to the full. 

Be that as it may, the view stated by Heracleitus is of capital 
importance. It shows that to a philosopher writing at the end of 
the 6th century B.c. the Erinyes were embodiments of law, ministers 
bf Justice. Of course a philosopher is as little to be taken as 
reflecting popular faith as a poet, indeed far less; but even a 
philosopher cannot, save on pain of becoming unintelligible, use 
words apart from popular associations. Heracleitus was indeed 


_drunk with the thought of law, of Fate, of unchanging ‘moral 


1 Tl. rx. 454. 2 Tl.xxx. 412. 

3 Il. xix. 418 ws dpa pwvijoavros épwises rxeBov avdyy. 

4 Plut. de Hx. 11 dos yap obx brepBhoera pérpa (pnoly 6 ‘Hpdxdecros) ef 5 wh 
*"Epuwvies pw, Alxns émlxovpon, éevpjoovoew. 


vl The Erinyes of Aeschylus 217 


retribution, with the eternal sequence of his endless flux; his 
Erinyes are cosmic beyond the imagination of Homer, but still the 
fact remains that he uses them as embodiments of the vengeance 
that attends transgression. By his time they are not Keres, not 
souls, still less bacilli, not even avengers of tribal blood, but in the 
widest sense ministers of Justice! (Aixns ésrixoupoc). 


THE ERINYES OF AESCHYLUS. 


Heracleitus has pushed abstraction to its highest pitch. When 
we come to Aeschylus we find, as would be expected, a conception 
of the Erinyes that is at once narrower and more vitalized, more 
objective, more primitive. In the Septem? the conception is 
narrower, more primitive than in Homer; the Erinys is in fact 
an angry ghost. This is stated with the utmost precision. 


‘Alas, thou Fate—grievous, dire to be borne, 
And Oedipus’ holy Shade, 
Black Erinys, verily, mighty art thou,’ 


chant the chorus again and again. Fate is close at hand and 
nigh akin,*but the real identity and apposition is between the 
shade, the ghost of Oedipus, and the black Erinys. 

Here and in the Prometheus Bound* Aeschylus is fully 
conscious that it is the actual ghost, not a mere abstract venge- 
ance that haunts and pursues. Io is stung by the oestrus* 
because she was a cow-maiden, but the real terror that maddens 
her is that most terrifying of all ancient ghosts, the phantom of 


earth-born Argus. 
a = 

‘Woe, Woe! 

Again the gadfly stings me as I go. 

The earth-born neatherd Argos hundred-eyed, 

Earth, wilt thou never hide? 


1 The conception of Dike was largely due to Orphic influence, see p. 507. 
2 v, 988 

id potpa Bapvddretpa moyepa 

moTvid T Oildimou oKia 

péda’ "Epwis, 7 meyacberys tis el. 

3 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 566. ; : ; 

4 The gadfly is purely incidental to Io as cow. Oistros is an incarnation of the 
distraction caused by the ghost. On a vase-painting representing the slaying of her 
children by Medea, Oistros (inscribed) is represented as a figure in a chariot drawn 
by snakes, and near at hand is ‘the ghost of Aietes’ (inscribed) who sent it. (Arch. 
Zeit. 1847, T. 3.) 


218 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


O horror! he is coming, coming nigh, 
Dead, with his wandering eye. 
Uprising from the dead 

He drives me famished 

Along the shingled main, 


His phantom pipe drones with a sleepy strain. 
Ye gods, what have I done to cry in vain, 
Fainting and frenzied with sting-driven pain ?’ 


But when we come to the Oresteia, the Erinyes are envisaged 
from a different angle. The shift is due partly to the data of the 
- plot, the primitive saga out of which it is constructed, partly to 
a definite moral purpose in the mind of the tragedian. 


The primitive material of the trilogy was the story of the 
house of Atreus in which the motive is the blood-curse working 
from generation to generation, working within the narrow limits 
of one family and culminating in the Erinys of a slain mother. 
At the back of the Orestes and Clytaemnestra story lay the 
primaeval thought so clearly expressed by Plato in the Laws’. 
‘If a man, says the Athenian, ‘kill a freeman even unintention- 
ally, let him undergo certain purifications, but let him not dis- 
regard a certain ancient tale of bygone days as follows: “ He who 
has died by a violent death, if he has lived the life of a freeman, 
when he is newly dead, is angry with the doer of the deed, and 
being himself full of fear and panic on account of the violence he 
_has suffered and seeing his murderer going about in his accustomed 
haunts, he feels terror, and being himself disordered? communicates 
the same feeling with all possible force, aided by recollection, to 
the guilty man—both to himself and to his deeds.” ’ Here the actual 
ghost is the direct source of the disorder and works like a sort 
of bacillus of madness. It is not the guilty conscience of the 
murderer, but a sort of onset of the consciousness of the murdered. 


1 Plat. Legg. 1x. 865. 

2 Mr F, M. Cornford draws my attention to a similar and even cruder English 
superstition. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his Observations on the Religio Medici (5th ed. 
p. 128), maintains as against Sir Thomas Browne who says that apparitions are devils, 
that those that appear in cemeteries and charnel-houses are the souls of the dead 
which have ‘a byas and a languishing’ towards their bodies, and that the body of 
a murdered man bleeds when the murderer approaches (‘ which is frequently seen 
in England’) because the soul, desiring revenge, and being unable to speak, ‘must 
endeavour to cause a motion in the subtilest or most fluid parts (and consequently 
the most moveable ones) of it. This can be nothing but the blood, which then being 
violently moved, must needs gush out at those places where it findeth issues.’ 


v1 The Curse of the Blood 219 


Its action is local, and hence the injunction that the murderer 
must leave the land. How fully Aeschylus was conscious of this 
almost physical aspect of crime as the action of the disordered 
ghost on the living comes out with terrible vividness in the 
Choephorv? : 

‘The black bolt from below comes from the slain 

Of kin who cry for vengeance, and from them 


Madness and empty terror in the night 
' Comes haunting, troubling.’ 


It is ‘the slain of kin’ who cries for vengeance. As Pausanias? 
says of the same house, ‘the pollution of Pelops and the avenging 
ghost of Myrtilos dogged their steps.’ ‘Fate,’ says Polybius®, 
‘placed by his (Philip’s) side Erinyes and Poinae and Pointers-to- 
Vengeance (mpootpomaious). Here clearly all the words are 
synonymous. Apollo threatens the slayer of his mother with 

‘Yet other onsets of Erinys sent 
Of kindred blood the dire accomplishment, 


Visible visions that he needs must mark, 
Aye, though he twitch his eyebrows in the dark*.’ 


To cause these ‘ onsets,’ these poo Borat, or, as they are some- 
times called, éfodo:, was, Hippocrates’ tells us, one of the regular 
functions of dead men. 

Behind the notion of these accesses of fright, these nocturnal 
apparitions caused by ghosts, there is in the mind of Aeschylus the 
still more primitive notion that the shed blood not only ‘brings 
these apparitions to effect,’ but is itself a source of physical infection. 
Here we seem to get down to a stratum of thought perhaps even 
more primitive than that of the bacillus-like Keres. The Chorus 
in the Choephori sings®: 

‘Earth that feeds him hath drunk of the gore, 
Blood calling for vengeance flows never more, 


But stiffens, and pierces its way é 
Through the murderer, breeding diseases that none may allay. 


1 Aesch. Choeph. 285. 

2 P. 1. 18. 2 76 wiacwa 7d Wédoros kal 6 Mupritov mpoorpérasos jKodovdnce. 

Sexi. 1O2: 

4 Choeph. 282. In the interpretation of this passage I follow Dr Verrall, Choe- 
phori, ad v. 286. ; ; . 

° Hippocr. zrepi iepis votcou, p. 123, 20 droca dé deluara vuKros maplorara Kal 
P6Bo Kal wapdvoa Kai dvarndjoes ex KNwis Exarns paciv eivac éewiBoudas kal Npwwv 
epddous. 
: § Aesch. Choeph. 64. The same idea comes out in the Electra of Euripides 
(v. 318). 


~\ 


220 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys (0H. 


The blood poisons the earth, and thereby poisons the murderer 
fed by earth. As Dr Verrall (ad loc.) points out, it is the old 
doctrine of the sentence of Cain, ‘And now art thou cursed from 
the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's 
blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not 
henceforth yield unto thee her strength.’ 

In the crudest and most practical form, this notion of the 
physical infection of the earth comes out in the story of Alemaeon. 
Pausanias! tells us that when Alcmaeon had slain his mother 
Eriphyle, he came to Psophis in Arcadia, but there his disease 
nowise abated. He then went to Delphi, and the Pythia taught 
him that the only land where the avenger of Eriphyle could not 
dog him was the newest land which the sea had laid bare subse- 
quently to the pollution of his mother’s blood, and he found out 
the deposit of the river Achelous and dwelt there. There, by the 
new and unpolluted land he might be nourished and live. Apollo- 
dorus? misses the point: he brings Alemaeon to Thesprotia and 
purifies him, but by the waters of Achelous. 

The case of Alemaeon does not stand alone. It has a curious 
parallel in the fate that befell Bellerophon, a fate that, I think, 
has not hitherto been rightly understood. 

In Homer’ the end of Bellerophon is mysterious. After the 
episode with Sthenoboea, he goto Lycia, is royally entertained, 
marries the king’s daughter, rules over a fair domain, begets three 
goodly children, and then, suddenly, without warning, without 
manifest cause, he comes to be 


‘Hated of all the gods. And in the Aleian plain apart 
He strayed, shunning men’s foot-prints, consuming his own heart.’ 


Homer, with a poet’s instinct for the romantic and mysterious, 
asks no questions; Pindar‘ with his Olympian prejudice saw in 


the downfall of Bellerophon the proper meed of ‘insolence.’ 


Bellerophon’s heart was ‘aflutter for things far-off” he had vainly 
longed for 


‘The converse of high Zeus.’ 


1 Pp. vit. 24. 8 and 9 kal adrov 7 Iv@la diddoKe Tov Hpiptdns addoropa és ravrny ol 
povnv Xwpay ov cuvaxoovOjaew Aris €oTl vewrdry, Kal } Oddacoa Tod uNTpwoU LudTMaToS 
dvépnvev tarepov adriv. Kalo mev ekevpdy rod’ Axedgou Thy mpdboxwow évravla OKnoe. 

2 Apollod. ut. 7. 5. 

3 Tl. vr. 200. 4 Pind. Isth. vy. 66. 


v] The Curse of the Blood 221 


But the mythographers knew the real reason of the madness 
and the wandering, knew of the old sin against the old order, 
Apollodorus’ says: ‘ Bellerophon, son of Glaukos, son of Sisyphos, 
having slain unwittingly his brother Deliades, or, as some say, 
Peiren, and others Alkimenes, came to Proetus and was purified” 
On Bellerophon lay the taboo of blood guilt. He came to Proetus, 
but, the sequel shows, was not purified. In those old days he 
could not be. Proetus sent him on to the king of Lycia, and the 
king of Lycia drove him yet further to the only land where he 
could dwell, the Aleian or Cilician plain®. This Aleian plain was, 
like the mouth of the Acheloiis, new land, an alluvial deposit 
slowly recovered from the sea, ultimately in Strabo’s time most 
fertile, but in Bellerophon’s days a desolate salt-marsh. The 
madness of Bellerophon—for in Homer he is obviously mad—is 
the madness of Orestes, of the man blood-stained, Erinys-haunted ; 
but the story of Bellerophon, like that of Alemaeon, looks back to 
days even before the Erinys was formulated as a personality, to 
days when Earth herself was polluted, poisoned by shed blood. 


Aeschylus then in the Oresteza is dealing with a primitive story 
and realizes to the uttermost its primaeval savagery. But he has 
chosen it for a moral purpose, nay more, when he comes to the 
Eumenides, with an actual topical intent. He desires first and 
foremost by the reconciliation of old and new to justify the ways 
of God to men, and next to show that in his own Athenian law- 
court of the Areopagus, those ways find their fullest practical 
human expression. That court, he somehow contrived to believe, 
or at least saw fit to assert, was founded on a fact of tremendous 
moral significance, the conversion of the Erinyes into Semnae. 
The conception of the Erinyes comes to Aeschylus from Homer 
almost full-fledged; his mythological data, unlike his plots, were 
‘slices from the great feasts of Homer, and this in a very strict 
sense, for, owing no doubt partly to the primitive legend selected, 
he has had to narrow somewhat the Homeric conception of the 
Erinyes and make of them not avengers in general, but avengers 
of tribal blood. Moreover he has emphasized their legal character. 


1 Apollod. m. 2. 3. ; ‘ 
2 For this information as to the character of the Aleian plain, which suggested 
the view in the text, I am indebted to the kindness of Prof. Ramsay, 


222 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [0uH. 


/ It is noteworthy that when Athene formally asks the Erinyes who 
\ and what they are’, their answer is not ‘ Erinyes’ but 


‘Curses our name in haunts below the earth!’ 


And when Athene further asks their function and prerogatives 
(tewat) the answer is: 


f ‘Man-slaying men we drive from out their homes?.’ 


\. The essence of primitive law resided, as has already (p. 142) 
been seen, in the curse, the imprecation. Here the idea is not 
that of a cosmic Fate but of a definite and tangible curse, the 
curse of blood-guilt. It is scarcely possible to doubt that in 
emphasizing the curse aspect of the Erinyes, Aeschylus had in 
his mind some floating reminiscence of a traditional connection 
between the Arae and the Areopagus. He is going to make the 
Erinyes turn into Semnae, the local Athenian goddesses invoked 
upon the Areopagus: the conception of the Erinyes as Arae makes 
as it were a convenient bridge. The notion of the Eninyes as 
goddesses of Cursing is of course definitely present in Homer, but 
it is the notion of the curse of the broken oath rather than the 
curse of blood-guilt. In the great oath of Agamemnon® he, as 
became an Achaean, prays first to Zeus, but also to Earth and to 
the Sun and to the Erinyes who 


‘Beneath the earth ° 
Take vengeance upon mortals, whosoe’er 
Forswears himself.’ 


Hesiod‘, borrowing from Melampus, tells us that 
‘On the fifth day, they say, the Erinyes tend 


Oath at his birth whom Eris bore, a woe 
To any mortal who forswears himself.’ 

Aeschylus narrows the Homeric and Hesiodic conception of the 
Erinyes to the exigencies of the particular legend he treats; they are 
for him almost uniformly the personified Curses that attend the 
shedding of kindred blood, though now and again he rises to the 
cosmic conception of Heracleitus, as when the chorus in the 
Eumenides exclaim*® 


‘O Justice, O ye thrones 
Of the Erinyes,’ 


1 Aesch. Hum. 417. 2 Tb. 421. 
3 Tl. x1x. 258. 4 Hes. Lrg. 803. 5 Aesch. Hum. 511, 


Vv] The Tragic Erinyes 223 


and chant the doom that awaits the transgressor in general; but 
the circumstances of the plot compel a speedy return within 
narrower limits. 


THE Tracic ERINYES. 


The Erinyes in Homer are terrors unseen: Homer who lends to 
his Olympians such clear human outlines has no embodied shape 
for these underworld Angry Ones; he knows full well what they 
do, but not how they look. But Aeschylus can indulge in no 
epic vagueness. He has to bring his Erinyes in flesh and blood 
actually on the stage; he must make up his mind what and who 
they are. Fortunately at this point we are not left with a mere 
uncertain stage tradition or the statements of late scholiasts and 
lexicographers. From Aeschylus himself we know with unusual 
precision how his Erinyes appeared on the stage. The priestess 
has seen within the temple horrible things; she staggers back in 
terror to give—for her horror-stricken state—a description remark- 


ably explicit. The exact order of her words is important?: 
‘Fronting the man I saw a wondrous band 
Of women, sleeping on the seats. But no! 
No women these, but Gorgons—yet methinks 
I may not liken them to Gorgon-shapes. 
Once on a time I saw those pictured things 
THAt snatch at Phineus’ feast, but these, but these 
Are wingless—black, foul utterly. They snore, 
Breathing out noisome breath. From out their eyes 
They ooze a loathly rheum.’ 


The whole manner of the passage arrests attention at once. 
Why is Aeschylus so unusually precise and explicit? Why does 
he make the priestess midway in her terror give this little archaeo- 
logical lecture on the art-types of Gorgons and Harpies? The 
reason is a simple one; the Erinyes as Hrinyes appear for the first 
time in actual definite shape. Up to the time when Aeschylus 
brought them on the stage, no one, if he had been asked what an ~ 
Erinys was like, could have given any definite answer; they were 
unseen horrors which art up to that time had never crystallized 
into set form. The priestess is literally correct when she says? : 


‘This race of visitants ne’er have I seen.’ 


1 Aesch, Hum. 46 ff. 2 Cea 


224. Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [on. 


Aeschylus had behind him, to draw from, a great wealth of bogey 
types; he had black Keres, such as those on the shield of Herakles; 
he had Gorgons, he had Harpies, but he had no ready-made shape 
for his Erinyes, only the Homeric horror of formlessness. What 
will he do? What he did do is clearly set forth by the priestess. 
When she first, in the gloom of the adyton, catches sight of the 
sleeping shapes, she thinks they are women, they have something 
human about them; but no, they are too horrible for women, they 
must be Gorgons. She looks a little closer. No, on second thoughts, 
they are not Gorgons; they have not the familiar Gorgon mask ; 
there is something else she has seen in a picture, Harpies, ‘ those 
that snatch at Phineus’ feast. Can they be Harpies? No, again, 
Harpies have wings, and these are wingless. Here precisely came 
in the innovation of Aeschylus; he takes the Harpy-type, loath- 
some and foul, and rids them of their wings. It was a master- 
touch!, lifting the Erinyes from the region of grotesque impossible 
bogeydom to a lower and more loathsome, because wholly human, 
horror. | 

The ‘Gorgon shapes, which indeed amount almost to Gorgon 
masks—so characteristic is the ugly face with tusks and protruding 
tongue—have been already fully discussed (p. 187), but for clearness’ 
sake another illustration, which can be securely dated as before 
the time of Aeschylus, may be added here. ‘The design in fig. 46 
is from a black-figured olpe in the British Museum’. It is signed 
by the potter Amasis ("Ayacis p’ éroincev), and dates about the 
turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.c. The scene depicted is the 
slaying of the Gorgon Medusa by Perseus. Medusa is represented 
with the typical ugly face, protruding tusks and tongue. On her 
lower lip is a fringe of hair; four snakes rise from her head. She 
wears a short purple chiton, over which is a stippled skin with 
two snakes knotted at the waist. She has high huntress-boots 
and two pairs of wings, one outspread the other recurved. The 
essential feature of the Gorgon in Greek art is the hideous mask- 
like head; but she has usually, though not always, snakes somewhere 
about her, in her hair or her hands or about her waist. The wings, 

1 A master-touch from the point of view of Aeschylus, who is all for the new 
order. It is however impossible to avoid a regret that he stooped to the cheap 
expedient of blackening the Erinyes as representatives of the old. He thereby 


half alienates our sympathies. See ‘ Delphika,’ J. H. S. xrx. 1899, p. 251. 
2 Cat. B 471. Vorlegeblitter 1889, Taf. 1. la. 


vl The Erinys in Art 295 


also a frequent though not uniform appendage, are sometimes two, 
sometimes four. In common with the Harpy, to whom she is so 












; Er Te Naas 
vs NZ an 


: aN A\| 





Fic. 46. 


near akin, she has the bent knee that indicates a striding pace. 
That Harpy and Gorgon are not clearly distinguished is evident 
from the vase-painting already discussed (p. 176, fig. 19), in which 
the Gorgon sisters of Medusa are inscribed Harpies (‘Apezrua). 
Broadly speaking the Gorgon is marked off from the Harpy 
by the mask-face. The Harpy is a less monstrous form of Gorgon, 
but at worst there was not much to choose between them. We 





Fic. 47. 


sympathize with the hesitation of the priestess, when we compare 
the. Medusa-Gorgon of the Amasis vase (fig. 46) with the un- 
15 
H. 


226 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [0u. 


doubted Harpies of the famous Wiirzburg? cylix (fig. 47). Here 
we have depicted the very scene remembered by the priestess, 
‘those pictured things that snatch at Phineus’ feast.’ The vase is in 
a disastrous condition, and the inscriptions present many difficulties 
as well as uncertainties, but happily those that are legible and 
certain are sufficient to place the subject of the scene beyond 
a doubt. It would indeed be clear enough without the added 
evidence of inscriptions. Phineus to the nght reclines at the 
banquet, attended by women of his family, whose names present 
difficulties and need not here be discussed. The Harpies? (’Ape...), 
pestilential unclean winds as they are, have fouled the feast. But for 
the last time they are chased away by the two sons of Boreas, Zetes 
and Kalais, sword in hand. The sons of the clean clear North 
Wind drive away the unclean demons. All the winds, clean and 
unclean, are figured alike, with four wings each; but the Boreadae 
are of course male, the women Harpies are draped. 

Before returning to the tragic Erinyes, another vase must be 





Fie. 48. 


discussed. The design, from an early black-figured cylix in the 
Louvre’, is reproduced in fig. 48. The centre of interest is clearly 


1 Wiirzburg, Inv. 354. 

2 The Phineus cylix is published in phototype by Carl Sittl, ‘Die Phineus Schale, 
und aihnliche Vasen,’ Programm xxv., forming part of the Jahresbericht des Wagner- 
ischen Kunst-Instituts der Kgl. Universitit Wiirzburg 1892. The account there 
given of the difficult inscriptions is inadequate and must be supplemented by 
reference to Dr Bohlau’s corrections in his paper on ‘Die Ionischen Augenschalen,’ 
A. Mitt. 1898 (xx1m.) pp. 54, 77; sée also Furtwiingler-Reinhold, Pl. 41. 

8 Pottier, Cat. A. 478, pl. 17.1. The vase is further discussed by Mr Barnett, 
Hermes, ‘ Miscellen,’ 1898, p, 639. Mr Barnett sees in the winged figure Iris, an 
interpretation with which I cannot agree. 


v] The Erinys in Art 297 


the large dog, a creature of supernatural size, almost the height 
of a man. To the left of him a bearded man is hastening away ; 
he looks back, apparently in surprise or consternation. Immediately 
behind the dog comes a winged figure, also in haste, and manifestly 
interested in the dog. Behind her is Hermes, and behind him, as 
quiet spectators, two women figures. There is only one possible 
explanation of the general gist of the scene. It is the story of the 
golden dog of Minos stolen from Crete by Pandareos, king of 
Lycia, and by him from fear of Zeus deposited with Tantalos. 
The scholiast on the Odyssey! tells the story in commenting on 
the lines ‘As when the daughter of Pandareos the bright brown 
nightingale’ as follows. ‘There is a legend about the above- 
mentioned Pandareos, that he stole the golden dog of Zeus in 
Crete, a life-lke work of Hephaistos, from the precinct of Zeus, 
and having stolen it he deposited it with Tantalos. And when 
Zeus demanded the stolen thing by the mouth of Hermes Tantalos 
swore that he had it not. But Zeus when he had got the dog 
again, Hermes having secretly taken it away, buried Tantalos 
under Sipylos. Another scholiast? gives a different version, in 
which judgment fell on the daughters of Pandareos. ‘Merope 
and Kleothera (daughters of Pandareos) were brought up by 
Aphrodite; but when Pandareos, having received the dog stolen 
from Crete in trust for Tantalos, denied that he ever took it, 
Merope and Kleothera were snatched away by the Harpies and 
given to the Erinyes.’ 

In the light of this version the vase-painting is clear. The 
moment chosen is the coming of Hermes to claim the dog. It is 
no use Pandareos denying he had it, for there it is, larger than 
life. The vase-painter had to put the dog in, to make the story 
manifest. The two women spectators are the daughters of Pan- 
dareos, Merope and Kleothera. Who is the winged figure ? 
Archaeologists variously name her Iris, a Harpy, an Erinys. 
Iris I unhesitatingly reject. Between a Harpy and an Erinys 
the choice is harder, and the doubt is instructive. Taking into 
consideration the Lycian character of the story, and the not 
unimportant fact that the design of the reverse represents a 
Lycian myth also, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, I think we 

1 Schol. ad Od. 7 518 and P. x. 30. 2. Pind. Schol. Ol. 1. 90. 
2 Schol. Ambros. B. ad 7 518. 


15—2 


228 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


may safely say that the figure is a Harpy, but it is a Harpy 
performing the functions of an Erinys, avenging the theft, aveng- 
ing the broken oath, come also to fetch the two maidens whom 
she will give to be handmaids to the hateful Erinyes—so near 
akin, so fluctuating are the two conceptions. 


The fact then that Aeschylus brought them on the stage and 
his finer poetical conception of horror compelled the complete and 
human formulation of the Erinyes; before his time they have no 
definite art-type. The Erinyes of Aeschylus are near akin to 
Gorgons, but they lack the Gorgon mask; nearer still to Harpies, 
but wingless. It is curious and interesting to note that at the 
close of the Choephori1, where they do not appear on the stage, 
where they are visible only to the imagination of the mad Orestes, 
he sees them like the shapes he knows— 


‘These are like Gorgon shapes 
Black-robed, with tangled tentacles entwined 
Of frequent snakes.’ 


Aeschylus felt the imaginative gain of the purely human form, 


Zi 


ESSA 


P| fret | fre foe Eg | ce] fred | fel | | fred] 


Fia. 49. 





but his fellow artist the vase-painter will not lightly forego the 
joy of drawing great curved wings. In vases that are immediately 


1 Aesch. Choeph. 1048. The noisome exudation from the eyes noted by 
Aeschylus (Hum. 54) has already been shown (p. 195) to be characteristically Gorgon. 


v| — Influence of Aeschylus 229 


post-Aeschylean the wingless type tends to prevail, though not 
wholly ; later it lapses and the great fantastic wings reappear. On 
the red-figured vase-painting’ in fig. 49—the earliest of the series 
and dating somewhere towards the end of the 5th century—we 
have the scene of the purification of Orestes. He is seated close 
to the omphalos—sword in hand. Above his head Apollo holds 
the pig of purification, in his left hand the laurel; to the right 
is Artemis as huntress with spears; to the left are the sleeping 
wingless Erinyes; the ghost of Clytaemnestra beckons to them to 
wake. From the ground rises another Erinys, a veritable earth 
demon. The euphemism of the vase-painter makes the Erinyes 
not only wingless but beautiful, as fair to see as Clytaemnestra. 
The next picture? (fig. 50) is later in style, but far more 





MN) 


UWE is wanna 








closely under dramatic influence. We have the very opening 
scene of the Eumenides. The inner shrine of the temple, a small 


1 Monimenti dell’ Inst. tv. pl. 48. Baumeister, p. 1314. The vase, an orybaphon, 
is now in the Louvre. 
2 Hermitage, Cat. 1. 349. Stephani, Compte Rendu 1863, pl. v1. 5. 


230 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cuH. 


Ionic naos, the omphalos, and the supplicant Orestes, with no 
Apollo to purify: the frightened priestess holding the symbol 
of her office, the great temple key with its sacred fillet. All 
about the shrine are lying the Erinyes, wingless and loathly; the 
scanty dishevelled hair and pouting barbarous lips are best seen 
in the rightmost Erinys, whose face is drawn profile-wise. 

In the third representation’ from a krater formerly in the Hope 
Collection (fig. 51) the style is late and florid, and the vase-painter 





Fie. 51. 


has shaken himself quite free from dramatic influence. Orestes 
crouches in an impossible pose on the great elaborately decorated 
omphalos; Apollo is there with his filleted laurel staff. The place 
of Artemis is taken by Athene, her foot resting on what seems 
to be an urn for voting. To the left is an Erinys, in huntress 
garb, with huge snake and high curved wings; but the vase- 
painter is indifferent and looks for variety: a second Erinys, who 
leans over the tripod, is well furnished with snakes, but has no 


wings. 


1 Millin, Peintwres des vases grecs 11. 68. Baumeister, fig. 1315, p. 1118. 


v] The Hrinyes as Poinae 231 


In the last and latest of the series, a kalpis in the Berlin 
Museum! (fig. 52), the Erinys is a mere angel of vengeance; her 
wings are no longer fantastic, she is no huntress, but a matronly, 
heavily draped figure ; 
she holds a scourge in 
her hand, she is more 
Poine than Erinys, only 
about her is still curled 
a huge snake. 


OT LTT TIIONION 


Aeschylus then, we 
may safely assert, first 
gave to the Erinyes 
outward and _ visible 
shape, first differen- 
tiated them from Keres, 
Gorgons, or Harpies. 
In this connection it is 
worth noting that the 
Erinyes or Poinae were 
not infrequently  re- 
ferred to in classical 
literature as though 
they were almost the 
exclusive property of 
the stage. Aeschines?, is 
in his oration against Fie. 52. 
Timarchus, exhorts the 
Athenians not to imagine ‘that impious men as in the tragedies 
are pursued and chastized by Poinae with blazing torches.’ 
Plutarch® in his life of Dion tells how, when the conspiracy of 
Callippus was on foot against him, Dion had a ‘monstrous and 
portentous vision.’ As he was meditating alone one evening he 
heard a sudden noise and saw, for it was still light, a woman of 
gigantic size, ‘in form and raiment exactly like a tragic Erinys.’ 
She was sweeping the house with a sort of broom. 

On Lower Italy vases the Erinyes as Poinae frequently appear 











1 Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1890, Anzeiger, p. 90. : 
2 Aeschin. c. Tim. 80. 3 Plut. Vit. Dion. c. 55. 


232 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [CH. 


(Chap. x1). They are sometimes winged, sometimes unwinged. 
From the august ministers of the vengeance of the dead they have 
sunk to be the mere pitiless tormentors of hell. They lash on 
Sisyphos to his ceaseless task, they bind Peirithods, they fasten 
Ixion to his wheel. But it is curious to note that, though the 
notion of pursuit is almost lost, they still wear the huntress garb, 
the short skirt and high boots. It is needless to follow the down- 
ward course of the Erinys in detail, a course accelerated by 
Orphic eschatology, but we may note the last stage of degradation 
in Plutarch’s treatise ‘On those who are punished by the Deity 
‘late!’ The criminals whom Justice (Dike)—the Orphic divinity 
of purification rather than vengeance—rejects as altogether in- 
curable are pursued by an Erinys, ‘the third and most savage of 
the ministrants of Adrasteia. She drives them down into a place 
which Plutarch very properly describes as ‘not to be seen, not 
to be spoken of.’ The Erinyes are from beginning to end of the 
old order, implacable, vindictive; they know nothing of Orphic 
penance and purgatory; as ‘angels of torment?’ they go to people 
a Christian Hell. 


THE ERINYS AS SNAKE. 


‘We return to Aeschylus. His intent was to humanize the 
Erinyes that thereby they might be the more inhuman. The 
more horrible the shape of these impersonations of the old 
order the greater the miracle of their conversion into the gentle 
Semnae, and yet the easier, for so early as we know them the 
Semnae are goddesses, human as well as humane. 

In his persistent humanizing of the Erinyes Aeschylus suffers 
one lapse, the more significant because probably unconscious. 
When Clytaemnestra would rouse the Erinyes from their slumber, 
she cries’, 

‘Travail and Sleep, chartered conspirators, 
Have spent the fell rage of the dragoness.’ 

It is of course possible to say that she uses the word 

‘dragoness’ (dpaxawva) ‘poetically,’ for a monster in general, 


1 Plut. de ser. nwm. vind. xxi. 
2 dyyedor Bacavioral in the Apocalypse of Peter; see Dieterich, Nekwia p. 61. 
® Aesch. Hum. 126. 


Vv] The Erinys as Snake 233 


possibly a human monster; but the question is forced upon us, why 
is this particular monster selected ? why does she say ‘ dragoness’ 
and not rather ‘hound of hell’? In the next lines! comes the 
splendid simile of the dog hunting in dreams, and it would 
surely have been more ‘poetical’ to keep the figure intact. But 
language and associations sometimes break through the best 
regulated conceptions, and deep, very deep in the Greek mind 
lay the notion that_the Erinys, the offended ghost, was a snake. 


The notion of the earth demon, the ghost as snake, will be con. 


sidered when hero-worship is dealt with (p. 3826). For the present 
it can only be noted in Aeschylus as an outcrop of a lower 
stratum of thought, a stratum in which the Erinys was not yet 
an abstracted or even humanized minister of vengeance, but 
simply an angry ghost in snake form. 

The use of the singular number, ‘dragoness,’ is, in itself, 
significant. The Erinyes as ministers of vengeance are indefinitely 
multiplied, but the old ghost-Erinys is one, not many; she is the 
ghost of the murdered mother. Clytaemnestra herself is the real 
‘dragoness, though she does not know it, and by a curious un- 
conscious reminiscence the Erinyes sleep till she, the true Erinys, 
rouses them. 

The mention by Aeschylus of the ‘dragoness’ does not stand 
alone. To Euripides also the Erinys isasnake. In the [phigeneva 
in Tauris? the mad Orestes cries to Pylades, 


‘Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes 
To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed ? 


Here it can hardly be said that the conception is borrowed from 
Aeschylus, for assuredly the stage Erinyes of Aeschylus, as he 
consciously conceived them, were in no wise snakes. Moreover 
the ‘Hades-snake’ confuses the effect of the ‘dread vipers’ 
that follow. In his Orestes also* Euripides makes the Erinyes 
‘maidens with the forms of snakes, where it is straining language, 
and quite needlessly, to say that the word dpaxovtwdes means 
‘having snakes in their hands or hair.’ 

Art too has these harkings back to the primitive snake 
form. The design in fig. 53 is from a black-figured amphora in 


EGR al 2 Kur. Iph. in T. 286. 
3 Kur. Or. 256. 


234 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys | CH. 


the Vatican Museum}, dating about the turn of the 6th and 
5th centuries B.c. We have 
the usual striding flying 
type, the four wings, the 
huntress boots—a type of 
which, as has been shown, it 
is hard to say whether it re- 
presents Gorgon or Harpy. 
There is no context to decide. 
One thing is clear. The vase- 
painter is afraid that we shall 
miss his meaning, shall not 
understand that this winged 
thing striding through the 
air 1s an earth demon, so he Fic. 53. 

paints below, moving part 

passu, a great snake. The winged demon is also a snake’. 





1 Passerius, Pict. Etrusc. m1. 297. J.H.S. vol. x1x. 1899, p. 219. This 
representation does not stand alone. Among the fragments of vase-paintings 
found in the excavations on the Acropolis, and as yet unpublished, is one of 
considerably earlier style than the design in fig. 53, and with a representation 
exactly similar in all essentials. The winged feet and part of the drapery of 
the figure remain, and below is a large snake with open mouth. Found as it was 
in the ‘pre-Persian’ débris, this fragment cannot be later and is probably much 
earlier than 480 B.c. 

* This striding flying pose with the bent knee has been used by some archaeo- 
logists to explain the epithet xauwirovs. But bending or turning the knee is not 
bending or turning the foot. It is possible that in this epithet applied (Aesch. 
Sept. 791) to the Krinys we have merely an expression of the instinct to create an 
uncouth deformed bogey. M. Paul Perdrizet (Mélusine vol. 1x. 1898, p. 99, ‘Les 
pieds ou les genoux a rebours’) makes the interesting suggestion that the cauwlrous 
*Epwis may be an Hrinys with feet turned the reverse way, a horrid distorted 
cripple. This peculiar form of deformity was not unknown among the ancients, as 
witness the statuettes cited as examples by M. Perdrizet, a bronze in the British 
Museum (Cat. Walters no. 216) and a terracotta in the National Museum at Athens 
(Cat. 7877: Stackelberg, Griiber der Hellenen, pl. uxxmt. 475). I do not feel 
confident of the rightness of this interpretation for two reasons, firstly, cauwirous 
seems scarcely to be the right epithet for a striking distortion which would rather 
be orpeBdXérovs or some such word, and secondly, constant stress is laid on the 
swiftness of the Erinys which would be inconsistent with a crippling deformity. 
On the other hand, figures with their feet reversed may have suggested the inevitable 
back-coming of the Erinys. Mr F. M. Cornford suggests to me that xauyirous is 
the humanized equivalent of yauyGyvé, an interpretation proffered by Blomfield 
but rejected in favour of pernix. The suggestion seems to me to carry fresh con- 
viction now that the Erinys is seen to be in her original essence and in her art-form 
near akin to Harpy, Sphinx and Bird-woman. Sophocles (Qed. Tyr. 1199) calls the 
Sphinx yauyarvé. In fig. 44 she is claw-footed ; the Harpy to the right in fig. 19 
has crooked claws for hands. Aeschylus may be using an epithet that originally 
meant ‘clutch-foot’ in some new sense as ‘plying the foot,’ i.e. swift, or as ‘ back- 
returning.’ 


v| The Erinys as Snake 235 


Most clearly of all the identity of ghost and snake comes out 
in the vase-painting in fig. 54 from 
an archaic vase of the type known 
as ‘ prothesis’ vases, in the Museum 
at Athens’. They are a class used 
in funeral ceremonies and decorated 
with funeral subjects. Two mourners 
stand by a grave tumulus, itself sur- 
mounted by a funeral vase. Within 
the tumulus the vase-painter depicts 
what he believes to be there. 
Winged eidola, ghosts, and a great 
snake, also a ghost. Snake and 
eidolon are but two ways of saying 
the same thing. The little flutter- 
ing figures here represented are 
merely harmless Keres, not angry 
vindictive Erinyes, but when the 
Erinys developes into an avenger she yet remembers that she is 
a snake-ghost. 

The Gorgon, too, has her snakes. To the primitive Greek 


~—o 


mind every bogey was earth-born. In the design in fig. 55? 








we have the slaying of the Gorgon Medusa. The inscriptions are 
not clearly legible, but the scene is evident. Perseus attended 
by Athene and one of the nymphs, who gave him the kibisis and 


1 A. Mitt. xvi. p. 379. J.H.S. xx. 1899, p. 219, fig. 4. ! 
2 Vienna Museum. Masner, Cat. 221. Annali dell’ Inst. 1866, Tav. d’ agg. R. 2. 


236 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [0u. 


helmet and winged sandals, is about to slay Medusa. Medusa is 
of the usual Gorgon type, but she holds in her hand a huge snake, 
the double of herself. 

But the crowning evidence as to the snake-form of the Erinys 
is literary, Clytaemnestra’s dream in the Choephort. Clytaemnestra 
dreams that she gives birth to and suckles a snake’. Dr Verrall 
(ad loc.) has pointed out that the snake is here the regular symbol 
of things subterranean and especially of the grave, and he conjectures 
that the snake may have been presented to the eyes of the audience 
by ‘the visible tomb of Agamemnon which would presumably be 
marked as a tomb in the usual way.’ I would go a step further. 
The snake is more than the symbol of the dead; it is, I believe, 
the actual vehicle of the Erinys. The Erinys is in this case not 
the ghost of the dead Agamemnon, but the dead Agamemnon’s 
son Orestes. The symbol proper to the ghost-Erinys is transferred 
to the living avenger. Orestes states this clearly?: 


‘Myself in serpent’s shape 
Will slay her.’ 
And this, not merely because he is deadly as a snake, but because 
he ts the snake, ie. the Erinys. 
Again, when Clytaemnestra cries for mercy, Orestes answers*: 


~ 


‘Nay, for my father’s fate hisses thy doom.’ 


The snake-Erinys in the Humenides, and here again in the 
Choephori, remains of course merely an incidental survival, import- 
ant mainly as marking the road Aeschylus has left far behind. 
It is an almost unconscious survival of a tradition that conceived 
of the Erinyes as actually ghosts, not merely as the ministers of 
ghostly vengeance. 

Before we leave the snake-Erinys, one more vase-painting must 
be cited, which brings this conception very vividly before us. The 
design in fig. 56 is from an early black-figured amphora of the class 
known as ‘Tyrrhenian,’ formerly in the Bourguignon collection at 
Naples*. The figure of a woman just murdered lies prostrate over 


1 Aesch. Choeph. 527 and 531. 2 v, 549. 
3 y. 927 
marpos yap aloa rovde cuplfer udpor, 
accepting Dr Verrall’s reading cupl(ec. 

4 Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1893, p. 93, pl. 1. The vase is there interpreted as the slaying 
of Polyxena, but I agree with Dr Thiersch (Tyrrhenische Amphoren, p. 56) that the 
scene represented is the slaying of Eriphyle by Alemaeon. In connection with the 
omphalos-tomb of the vase-painting it is worth noting that at Phlius near the house 
of divination of Amphiaraos there was an omphalos. See P. 1. 13. 7. 


v] The Erinyes of Sophocles 237 


an omphalos-shaped tomb. The warrior who has slain her escapes 
with drawn sword to the right. But too late. Straight out of 
the tomb, almost indeed out of the body of the woman, rises a 
huge snake, mouthing at the murderer. The intent is clear; it is 





the snake-Erinys rising in visible vengeance. The murderer is 
probably Alemaeon, who has just slain his mother Eriphyle. His 
story, already discussed (p. 220), is as it were the double of that 
of Orestes. The interpretation as Alemaeon is not quite certain. 
It does not however affect the general sense of the scene, ie. a 
murderer pursued by the instant vengeance of a snake-Erinys. 


Before passing to the shift from Erinyes to Semnae it may be 
well to note that another tragedian—priest as well as poet—held 
to the more primitive view, realized definitely that the Erinyes, 
the avengers, were merely angry implacable Keres. To Sophocles 
in the Oedipus Tyrannus! Apollo is the minister, not, as in the 
Eumemdes, of reconciliation, but of vengeance. He has taken 
over the functions of the Erinyes. With the lightning and fire 
of his father Zeus he leaps full-armed upon the guilty man; 


1 Soph. Oed. Tyr. 469. The attitude of Sophocles towards the Orestes myth, 
and the fashion in which he ignores the conflict between Apollo and the Erinyes, 
cannot be discussed here. It has been ably treated by Miss Janet Case in the 
Classical Review, May 1902, p. 195. 


238 Denonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [Cu. 


but even Apollo cannot dispense with the ancient avengers. With 
him 

‘Dread and unerring 

Follow the Keres.’ 
The Keres here are certainly regarded as a kind of Fate, but to 
translate the word ‘Fates’ is to precipitate unduly the meaning. The 
words calls up in the poet’s mind’, not only the notion of ministers 
of vengeance, but also the reminiscence of ghostly fluttering things. 
He says of the guilty man: 


‘Fierce as a bull is he, 

Homeless, with desolate foot he seeks to flee 
The dooms of Gaia’s central mound. 

In vain, they live and flit ever around.’ 


Again, in the Hlectra of Euripides’, though the Erinyes are 
fully personified as dog-faced goddesses, yet they are also Keres. 


‘They hunt you like dread Keres, goddesses 

Dog-faced, in circling madness.’ 
Here the word Keres seems to be used because Moirae is of too 
beneficent and omnipotent association; Keres keeps the touch of 
personal ghostly vengeance. 


To resume: the Erinyes are attributive epithets of ghosts, 
formless in Homer, but gradually developed by literature, and 
especially by the genius of Aeschylus, into actual impersonations. 
In accordance with this merely attributive origin it is not 
strange that qua Erinyes their cult is practically non-existent. 
In only one instance do we hear of a definite place of worship for 
the Erinyes as such. Herodotus* tells us that at Sparta the 
children of the clan of the Aegidae ‘did not survive.’ Accordingly 
in obedience to an oracle the Aegidae ‘made a sanctuary to the 
Erinyes of Laios and Oedipus.’ 

Here the Erinyes are plainly offended ancestral ghosts de- 
structive to the offspring of their descendants, and demanding to 
be appeased. In so far as they are ghosts, the ghosts of murdered 
or outraged men, the Erimyes were of course everywhere pro- 
pitiated, but rarely under their ‘Angry’ name. That the natural 
prudence of euphemism forbade. As abstract ministers of 
vengeance we have no evidence of their worship. Clytaemnestra* 


1 y, 475. 2 Kur. El. 1252. 
®° Herod. tv, 149. 4 Aesch. Lum. 106. 


} 


v] The ‘Sennai Theat’ ) 239 


indeed recounts in detail her dread service to the Erinyes, but 
when closely examined it is found to be merely the regular ritual of 
the dead and of underworld divinities; it has all the accustomed 
marks, the ‘wineless libations’ and the ‘nephalia for propitiation, 
the banquets by night’ offered on the low brazier (écydpa) 
characteristic of underworld sacrifice (p. 62). The hour was one, 
she adds, ‘shared by none of the gods.’ What she means is none 
of the gods of the upper air, the Olympians proper: it was an hour 
shared by every underworld divinity. Aeschylus has in a word 
transferred the regular ritual of ghosts to his partially abstracted 
ministers of vengeance, and has thereby left unconscious witness 
to their real origin. 


THE ‘SEMNAI THEAIL’ 


To these Erinyes, adjectival, cultless, ill-defined, the Venerable 
Goddesses (ceyvat Peat) present a striking contrast. If the Erinyes 
owe such substance and personality as they have mainly to poets, 
to Homer first, later to Aeschylus and the other tragedians, with 
the Semnae it is quite otherwise. Their names are of course 
adjectival—almost all primitive cultus names are—but from the 
first, as we know them, they are personal and local. The Erinyes 
range over earth and sea, the Semnae are seated quietly and 
steadfastly at Athens. They are the objects of a strictly local 
cult, never emerging to Pan-Hellenic importance. But for the 
fact that Aeschylus was an Athenian we should scarcely have 
realized their existence; they would have remained obscure local 
figures like the Ablabiae and the Praxidikae. 

In this connection it is of cardinal importance that, though we 
are apt to speak of them as the Semnae, the Venerable Ones, this 
is not their cultus title, not the fashion in which they were 
actually addressed at Athens. They are uniformly spoken of, not 
as the Venerable Ones, but as the Venerable Goddesses! (ai ceuvat 
Oeai). The distinction is important. It marks the fact that the 
Semnae from the first moment they come into our view have 


1 Pausanias (1. 31. 2) mentions one other place in Attica where the Semnae are 
worshipped under this name. At Phlya in one and the same sanctuary there were 
altars of Demeter Anesidora, of Zeus Ktesios, of Athene Tithrone, of Kore Protogone 
and of goddesses called Venerable (Leur&v dvouafouevwv Gear). 


240 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys |cH. 


attained a complete anthropomorphism, have passed from ghosts 
to goddesses'; they are clearly defined personalities with a definite 
cultus; they are primitive forms, in fact the primitive forms, of 
earth goddesses, of ‘such conceptions as culminated finally in the 
great figures of Demeter and Kore. Other such figures are, for 
Athens the two Thesmophoroi, who are indeed but developments, 
other aspects, of the Semnae; for Eleusis the ‘two goddesses,’ to 
Oem, known to us by inscriptions and reliefs; for Aegina Damia 
and Auxesia; and for the rest of Greece many another local form, 
dual or triune, which need not now be enumerated. The process 
of this gradual anthropomorphism, this passage from sprite and 
ghost and demon to full-fledged divinity will be fully traced when 
we come to the ‘ making of a goddess’ (p. 257). For the present it 
can only be noted*that the term ‘ goddesses’ sharply differentiates 
the Semnae from the Erinyes, who, save for sporadic literary 
mention, never attained any such rank. Euripides? does indeed 
make Orestes call the Erinyes ‘dread goddesses, but Aeschylus*® 
is explicit: ‘their adornment (xocwos) was neither human nor 
divine.” It must be distinctly understood that, as the Semnae 
are goddesses, they are dealt with at this point only by anticipa- 
tion, to elucidate the transformation effected by Aeschylus. 

What we certainly know of the Semnae, as distinct from 
kindred figures such as the Eumenides, is not very much, but 
such as it is, is significant. We know the site of their sanctuary, 
something of the aspect of their images, something also of their 
functions and of the nature of their ritual. We know in fact enough, 
as will be shown, to feel sure that like the Erinyes they were 
underworld potencies, ghosts who had become goddesses. The 
origin of the two conceptions is the same, but their development 
widely different, and moreover we catch it arrested at a different 
stage. 

It is obvious from the play of the Humenides that the worship 
of the Semnae at Athens was of hoary antiquity. It is true that 
Diogenes Laertius‘ states (on the authority of the augur Lobon) 


1 The best evidence of this is the language, always ceremonial, of oaths taken in 
the law courts, where we may be sure the Semnae are invoked by their official title, 
e.g. Deinarchus c. Dem. 47. Mapripowar ras ceuvas Peds, @ avdpes ’APnvator. But so 
far as I am aware the Semnae are never alluded to merely as Semnae. 

2 Eur. Or. 259. P ® Aesch, Hum. 55. 

4 Diog. Laert. 1. x. 6. See Demoulin, Kpiménide de Crete, p. 110. 


| 
v] The ‘Semnai Theat’ 241 


that the sanctuary of the Semnae at Athens was founded by 
Epimenides. The scene of the operations of Epimenides was un- 
doubtedly the Areopagos, but, as the purification of Athens took 
place in the 46th Olympiad, the statement that he founded the 
sanctuary must be apocryphal. Very likely he may have revived 
and restored the cult. Diogenes says that he took a number of 
black and white sheep and led them up to the Areopagos and 
thence let them go whither they would, and he commanded those 
who followed them to sacrifice each of them wherever the sheep 
happened to lie down, and so the plague would be stayed. 
Whence even now, adds Diogenes, you may find in the Athenian 
demes nameless altars in memory of this atonement. Some such 
altar as this was still to be seen at or near the Areopagos when 
St Paul preached there, and such an altar may have got as- 
sociated with the Semnae, who like many other underworld beings 
were Nameless Ones. 

The site of the worship of the Semnae was undoubtedly some 
sort of cave or natural chasm amplified artificially into a sanctuary. 
Such caves, clefts or chasms are, as has already been shown (p. 125), 
the proper haunts of underworld beings; they are also usually, 
though not uniformly, primitive. Of the sanctuary and the cultus 
images Pausanias! speaks as follows. After describing the Areo- 
pagos and the two unwrought stones called ‘Transgression’ 
(bPpes) and ‘ Pitilessness’ (avacdeia) on which accused and accuser 
stood, he says ‘And near is a sanctuary (cepov) of the goddesses 
whom the Athenians call Semnae, but Hesiod in the Theogony 
calls Erinyes. Aeschylus represents them with snakes in their 
hair, but in their images there is nothing frightful, nor in the 
other images of the underworld gods that are set up. There is a 
Pluto also and a Hermes and an image of Ge. And there those who 
have been acquitted in a suit before the Areopagos sacrifice. And 
others besides sacrifice, both strangers and citizens, and within 
the enclosure there is the tomb of Oedipus.’ 

Pausanias by his reference to Aeschylus betrays at once the 
source of his identification of the Semnae with the Erinyes. The 
statement cannot be taken as evidence that prior to Aeschylus 
any such identification was current. After the time of Aeschylus, 
classical writers, except when they are quoting ritual formularies, 

WP. 1, 28.6. 
Ls 16 


242 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cuH. 


begin to accept the fusion and use the names Erinyes, Eumenides, 
and Semnae as interchangeable terms. A like laxity unhappily 
obtains among modern commentators. 

The statement of Pausanias, that about the cultus images of 
the Semnae there was nothing frightful, is important, as showing 
how foreign to the Semnae was the terror-haunted conception of 
the tragic Erinys. Aeschylus might fuse the Erinyes and the 
Semnae at will, but the cultus images of the Semnae take on no 
attribute of the Erinyes. About these cultus images we learn 
something more from the scholiast on Aeschines. Commenting 
on the Semnae he says ‘These were three in number and were 
called Venerable Goddesses, or Eumenides, or Erinyes. Two of 
them were made of lychnites stone by Scopas the Parian, but the 
middle one by Kalamis.’ Here again we must of course discount 
the statement as regards the triple appellation, at least for a date 
preceding Aeschylus. The number of the statues is noticeable. 
At the time when the scholiast or his informant? wrote the images 
were unquestionably three. The origin and significance of the 
female trinities will be considered later (p. 286). For the present 
it is sufficient to note that the trinity was probably a later stage 
of development than the duality. From the notice of the scholiast 
we cannot be certain that the images were originally three; nay 
more, it looks as if there was some reminiscence of a duality. 
Moreover the scholiast on the Oedipus Coloneus* expressly states 
that according to Phylarchus the images of the Semnae at Athens 
were two in number. He adds that according to Polemon they 
were three. That the number three ultimately prevailed is highly 
probable, indeed practically certain. The scholiast on Aeschines 
goes on to say ‘the court of the Areopagos adjudged murder cases 
on three days in each month, assigning one day to each goddess.’ 


1 Schol. ad Aeschin. c. Timarch. 1. 188 c ‘rats ceuvats Beats.’ Tpeis joay atirac 
al Neyouevar ceuval Geal 7 Hvpevides 7 “Epwvves, wy ras pev Ovo Tas éxarépwiev 
Dkdras 6 IIdpios memolncev éx THs Aryvirov NlOov thy Se péonvy Kaddames. of dé 
*Apeomaryirar Tpels mov Tod unvos nucpas Tas povixas Olkas Edixafov éxaory TOv Pedy 
play nuépay drovewovres. ny O€ Ta weumomeva avrais lepd mémava Kal yadda év dyyeot 
Kepamelos. gaol pévror adras Is elvac kal Sxdrovs, ol dé Vxdrovs cai Evwviuns jv 
kal Iv dvoudgerbar, kdnOjvac bé Evmevldas éminpéorepov [de conj.: éminpa Vat. émt 
*Opéorov cett.] mpa&rov xadouuévas. The entire scholion is given here for con- 
venience, the ritual of cakes and milk has been previously discussed (p. 90). 

* Dr Wellmann (de Istro 14) has shown that in all probability the information 
of the scholiast is borrowed from the treatise of Polemon quoted by Clement of 
Alexandria in his Protrepticus, p. 41. 

® Schol. ad Oed. Col. 39 ‘&ugoBor Peal.’ Pidapxds gyor Svo av’ras elvac Ta Te 
ayddwara ’A@nvnor dUo, ILoNéuwy 5€ rpets adrds pyar. 


v] aes The ‘Semnai Theai’ 243 


The three days were probably a primitive institution, three being 
a number sacred to the dead, and these three days may have 
helped the development: of the threefold form of the Semnae. 
Later in considering the Charites and other kindred shapes (p. 286) 
it will be shown that-many different strands went to the weaving 
of a trinity. The strictly definite number of the Semnae, be it 
two or three, is in marked contrast to the indefinite ‘wondrous 
throng’ (@avpacrtos Aoxos) of the Aeschylean Erinyes. The 
contrast may have been softened, if in the concluding scene the 
chorus of Erinyes filed away in groups of three. 

-The sanctuary of the Semnae was, in the narrower sense of 
the word ‘sanctuary,’ a refuge for suppliants. This is, of course, 
a trait that it has in common with many other precincts. Thucy- 
dides! tells how in the conspiracy of Kylon some of the con- 
spirators sat down at the altars of the Venerable Goddesses, and 
were put to death at the entrance. A monument, the Kyloneion, 
was put up close to the Nine Gates to expiate the pollution. 
Plutarch?, in his account of this same conspiracy, adds a curious 
primitive touch: the conspirators connected themselves with the 
image of ‘the goddess’ by a thread, believing thereby they would 
remain immune; the thread broke of its own accord when they 
reached the Semnae; this was taken as an omen of rejection and 
they were put to death. Aristophanes twice alludes to the 
precinct of the Semnae as a place of sanctuary. In the Knights®, 
he makes the outraged triremes say 


‘If this is what the Athenians like, we must needs set sail forthwith 
And sit us down in the Theseion or in the Semnae’s shrine.’ 


In the Thesmophoriazusae*, when Mnesilochus is about to make 
off in a fright, Euripides asks 
‘You villain, where are you off to?’ 
and the answer is 
‘To the shrine of the Semnae.’ 

It is noticeable that in both these cases the name given to 
the goddesses of sanctuary is Semnae, not Erinyes or Eumenides. 
1 Thucyd. 1. 126. 2 Plut. Vit. Sol. x1. 

3 Ar, Eg. 1312 
iw & apéoxyn tadr’ ’A@nvaiois KabjoPat por Soxet 
és TO Onoeiov mreovcas 7) “mi TOV cEeuvGv Oewv. 
+ Ar. Thesm, 224 


EYP. otros ot mot Geis; 
MN. és 70 T&v cEemvav Geay. 


16—2 


244 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [CH. 


The confusion of the three was never local, only literary, and by 
the time of Aristophanes it has not yet begun. 

Euripides! is our solitary authority for the fact that the 
sanctuary was also oracular. At the close of the Electra he 
makes the Dioscuri, in a speech not untinged by irony, prophesy 
that Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes, will come to Athens and 
be acquitted by the equal vote, and that in consequence the 
baffled Erinyes will descend in dudgeon into a subterranean cleft 
hard by the Areopagos : 


‘A mantic shrine, 
Sacred, adored of mortals.’ 


Oracular functions were ascribed to most, if not all, underworld 
‘ divinities, so that it is quite probable that the description of the 
Dioscuri is correct. 


The sanctuary of the Semnae was open to suppliants and to 
those who sought oracular counsel, but to one unfortunate class 
of the community, happily a small one, it was rigidly closed. 
These were the people known as ‘second-fated’ or ‘later-doomed.’ 
Hesychius’, in explaining the term ‘second-fated’ (Sevtepdmrotpos), 
says ‘he is called by some “ later-doomed.” So a man is termed 
when the accustomed rites have been performed as though he 
were dead, and later on he reappears alive; and Polemon says that 
to such it was forbidden to enter the sanctuary of the Venerable 
Goddesses. The term is also used of a man who is reported to 
have died abroad and then comes home, and again of a man who 
passes a second time through the folds of a woman’s garment, as 
was the custom among the Athenians in a case of second birth.’ 

This curious statement is fortunately explained to us in in- 
structive detail by Plutarch in the answer to his 5th Roman 
Question. He there says ‘Those who have had a funeral and 
sepulture as though they were dead are accounted by the Greeks 
as not pure, and they will not associate with them, nor will they 
permit them to approach sanctuaries. And they say that a certain 
Aristinus, who believed in this superstition, sent to Delphi to 
enquire of the god and to ask release from the disabilities this 
custom imposed on him, and the Pythian made answer: 

“Whatsoe’er is accomplished by woman that travails in childbed, 
That in thy turn having done, sacrifice thou to the gods.” 


1 Kur, Hl, 1270. - * Hesych. s.v, devrepdrorpos. 


i ne 


yi The ‘Semnai Theai’ 245 


And Aristinus being a good and wise man gave himself up, like 
a new-born child, to the women to wash and swaddle and suckle, 
and all the others who were called “later-doomed” did the like.’ 
‘But,’ adds Plutarch, and doubtless most justly, ‘some say that 
these things were done with respect to the “later-doomed” before 
Aristinus did them, and the custom was an ancient one.’ 

Plutarch says the exclusion was from all sacred rites. In 
this he is probably mistaken. Anyhow in the case of the Semnae, 
and of all underworld divinities, the significance is clear. If 
a man comes back to life after burial rites, the reason to the 
primitive mind is that. there is something wrong with him; he is 
rejected by the powers below and unfit to mingle with his fellows 
in the world above; he is highly taboo. Despised of the gods, 
he is naturally rejected of his fellow men. The only chance for 
him is to be born again. 

When we come to the ritual of the Semnae every detail.con- 
firms the view that they are underworld beings. From Aeschylus 
himself! we know that ogaya, animal sacrifices consumed but 
not eaten, were offered to them. Athene bids the Erinyes, after 
they have turned Semnae, 


‘pass below the earth 
With these your sacred sphagia.’ 

The underworld nature of sphagia—the word has no English 
equivalent—has been fully discussed (p. 63). In careful writers, 
as has been seen, it is never interchangeable with ‘epeta, victims 
sacrificed and eaten. 

The scholiast on Sophocles’ speaks of the holocaust of a black 
sheep to the Eumenides, whom he identifies with the Semnae; but, 
as he expressly states that this sacrifice took place in the Pelopon- 
nese, we cannot safely attribute it to the local Semnae of Athens. 
It is probable that o@dyva formed part of the regular sacrifice 
mentioned by Pausanias as offered to the Semnae by the acquitted ; 
oddyia belong, as has already been shown, to the class of expiatory 
offerings. It was on o¢dya, which were also called toua, that 

1 Aesch. Eum. 1006 

ire kal cphaylwy TGvd’ bro cEuvay 
KaTa ys cUmeEVat. 

2 Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 42 ‘ras rav@’ dpdoas Eimevidas’...... Tére yap mp@rov 

Etyevidas KAnOjva evuevets xpibévte vixav map’ “A@nvaios Kal O\oKauTAGaL av’rais 


div ué\away év Kapveia [the reading Kapveig is doubtful] rs MeAorovyjcov. Pidjwov 
é 6 KwucKds érépas Poi Tas ceuvas Oeds Tav Eimevidwr. 


246 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [0H. 


oaths were taken (p. 64) in the law courts, oaths the extraordinary 
solemnity of which Demosthenes! emphasizes. A man so swearing 
stood on the fragments of victims officially and solemnly slain, and 
devoted himself and his household to destruction in case of perjury. 
By standing on the slain fragments he identifies himself proleptically 
with them. We have no explicit statement that the divinities by 
whom these awful oaths on the rousa had to be taken were the 
Semnae, but as the Semnae were the underworld divinities resident 
on the Areopagos, and as they were frequently invoked with the 
local heroes, and as sacrifice was done to them by the acquitted, it 
seems highly probable. If they were the goddesses of oaths, this 
is another link with the Erinyes, the avengers of oaths. It is 
notable that in an ordinary imprecation in the law-courts they 
take precedence of Athene herself. Thus Demosthenes? says, 
‘I call to witness the Venerable Goddesses, and the place they 
inhabit, and the heroes of the soil, and Athene of the city, and the 
other gods who have the city and the land in their dominion.’ 

We learn from Philo® that no slave was allowed to take part 
in the processions of the Semnae. This in a worship of special 
antiquity and solemnity is natural enough. But it is strange to 
hear from Polemon* that there was the same taboo on all the 
Eupatrids. Strange at first sight, but easily explicable. The 
Semnae are women divinities, and in this taboo on the Eupatrids 
there seems to lurk a survival of matriarchal conditions. Aeschylus 
in the Humenides is not concerned, save incidentally, to emphasize 
the issue between matriarchy and patriarchy, between kinship 
through the mother and through the father, but it hes at the 
back of the legend he has chosen for his plot. The stories of 
Orestes and Clytaemnestra, of Alemaeon and Eriphyle, are deep- 
rooted in matriarchy—both look back to the days when the only 
relationship that could be proved, and that therefore was worth 
troubling about, was that through the mother; and hence special 

1 Dem. c. Aristocr. p. 642. 2 Dem. c. Dein. 47. 

% Philo de praest. liber p. 886 B 616 wot Soxodow of Tav ‘ENjvev dfvdepxéoraror 
*AOnvator Ti emt rais ceuvats Deais Tommy Grav gTéANWOL SodrOY wundéva TpooauBdvery. 

4 Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 489 ‘drvcra pwrdv.’ rodro ard ris Spwuévyns Ovolas 
Tais Hipevior’ peta yap hovxlas ra lepd Spor kal did Todro of wév dd Hotxou Ovovew 
avrais kabdrep Ilokguwy év rots mpds ’Hparocbévny pyoiv ot'rw, ro 5é trav Hvararpidév 
yévos ov weréxer THs Ovolas Ta’rns. elra é&As* THs O€ mommrhs Ta’rys ‘Hovyldac d Sh yévos 
éorl mepl Tas Deuvas Oeds Kal rHv ryewoviay Exe. Kal mpoOvovrar mpd ris Ovolas Kpidov 


e ' y ~ ’ A v . 4 ia 

Hovxw lepdv, npw rotrov orw kadodvres did Tv evpnulav: ob 7d lepdy mapa 7d KuAdvecov 
Reena 2 

EKTOS TWV é€vvéa TWUAOY. 


v] The ‘Semnai Theat’ 247 


vengeance attends the slayer of the mother. In the light of this 
it is easy to understand why in the worship of the Semnae the 
family of Eupatrids—those well-born through their fathers—had 
no part. For them Apollo Patréos was the fitter divinity. The 
family of the Eupatrids had their own rites of expiation, ancestral 
rites significantly called wdrpia, paternal. These rites as described 
by Dorotheos have been already discussed (p. 60). 

The name of the family that held the priesthood of the Semnae 
is also recorded; they were the Hesychidae whom Hesychius! 
describes as ‘a family of well-born people at Athens.’ Polemon 
is again our authority for connecting these ‘Silent Ones’ with the 
cult of the Semnae. He is quoted by the scholiast already cited 
(p. 246 note). In commenting on the expression ‘uttering words 
inaudible’ the scholiast says ‘This is from the sacrifice performed 
to the Eumenides. For they enact the sacred rites in silence, and 
on account of this the descendants of Hesychos (the Silent One) 
sacrifice to them, as Polemon says in his writings about Erato- 
sthenes, thus: “the family of the Eupatrids has no share in this 
sacrifice”; and then further, “in this procession the Hesychidae, 
which is the family that has to do with the Venerable Goddesses, 
take the lead.” And before the sacrifice they make a preliminary 
sacrifice of a ram to Hesychos...giving him this name because 
of the ritual silence observed. His sanctuary is by the Kyloneion 
outside the Nine Gates.’ 

Though these remarks of the scholiast are prompted by the 
cult of the Eumenides at Colonos, it is quite clear that Polemon 
is speaking of the Semnae at Athens. He states three important 
facts. The cult of the Semnae was in the hands of a clan descended 
from a hero called aetiologically ‘the Silent One.’ Sacrifice to the 
goddesses was regularly preceded by the sacrifice of a ram to the 
eponymous hero. That hero had a sanctuary of his own outside 
the Nine Gates of the old Pelasgic fortification, and near the 
historic monument of Kylon. The name ‘Silent One’ is possibly 
a mere cultus epithet, used to preserve safely the anonymity of 
the hero ; heroes, as will later (p.340) be seen, are dangerous persons 
to mention. On the other hand Hesychos may have been the 
actual name of a real hero, and after his death it may have seemed 
charged with religious significance. This seems quite possible, 
the more so as the name was adopted by the whole family. The 


1 Hesych. s.yv., yévos “AOjvnow iayevav. 


248 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [cu. 


female form Hesychia was a proper name in the days of Nikias, 
and it is curious to find that even then an omen could be drawn 
from it. Plutarch! recounts that when the Athenians were taking 
omens before the Syracusan expedition an oracle ordered them to 
fetch a priestess of Athene from Clazomenae. They found, when 
they got her, that her name was Hesychia; and this seemed ‘a 
divine indication that they should remain quiet.’ 

The scholiast speaks of Hesychidae, male members of the family 
of Hesychos, but if we may trust Callimachus? it was the women 
of the family who brought burnt-offermgs; and these offerings 
were, as we should expect, wineless libations and honey-sweet 
cakes. The name of the priestesses was according to Callimachus 
ARTEeLpat, and it is no doubt from this source that Hesychius* gets 
his gloss, ‘ Leteirai, priestesses of the Semnae.’ 

The Semnae were women divinities served by priestesses, and 
it is noticeable that Athene, who was ‘all for the father, promises 
to the Erinyes that, if they become Semnae, they shall have 
worshippers, both men and women*. But when the procession to 
the cave is actually formed, in strict accordance no doubt with the 
traditional ritual of the place, it is women attendants who bring 
the ancient image, 

‘A goodly band, 
Maidens and wives and throng of ancient dames?®.’ 
It can scarcely be doubted that among these ancient dames were 
members of the clan of Hesychids. 

Aeschylus® has left us other notes of underworld significance 
in the ritual of the Semnae. When the procession is forming for 
the cave Athene speaks : 

‘Do on your festal garments crimson-dyed 
For meed of honour, bid the torches flame— 


So henceforth these our visitants shall bless 
Our land and folk with shining of their grace.’ 


1 Plut. Vit. Nik, x1. 
? Callim. frg. (Schneider 1. 123) 
Nygadv ai cai trhow del medpdéas durrvas 
Anretpac Kale EA\Naxov “Hovxldes. 
Hesych. s.v. Ajreipac: iéperac Trav cemvav Oedy. 
4 Aesch. Hum. 856. 5 y, 1026. 
6 Aesch. Hum. 1028 
powikoBdmroas évdurots écOjuacw 
TyuaTe Kal TO Péyyos opudobw mupds, 
brrws dv evppwv 76’ duidia xOovds 
TO Nowrov evdvdporor cuuopats mpéry. 
The construction of riywadre is uncertain, there being no expressed grammatical 
object; but the two ritual factors, the torches and crimson garments, are certain. 


Vv] The ‘Semnai Theat’ 249 


Athene proffers for guerdon to the Semnae the ritual that as 
underworld goddesses was already theirs, torches and crimson 
raiment. 

In connection with the torches it cannot be forgotten that 
some, though possibly not all, the sittings of the court of the 
Areopagos took place by night, doubtless in honour of the under- 
world goddesses who presided. In Lucian’s time, at least, these 
sittings were almost proverbial. He says of a man perceiving 
with difficulty’, ‘unless he chance to be stone-blind or like the 
Council of the Areopagos which gives its hearing by night’: and 
again in the Hermotimus? ‘he is doing it like the Areopagites who 
give judgment in darkness.’ ‘To these sittings in the night-time 
it may be that Athene refers when she says’ 

‘This court I set, untouched of gain, revered, 

Alert, a wakeful guard o’er those who sleep.’ 
The garments of crimson or purple dye point to a ritual of 
placation and the service of the underworld. This is clearly 
shown in the details given by Plutarch‘ of the rites of placation 
performed annually for those who fell in the battle of Plataea. 
‘On the 16th day of the month Maimakterion the archon of 
Plataea, who on other days may not touch iron nor wear any 
garment that is not white, puts on a crimson chiton and taking a 
hydria and girded with a sword goes to the sepulchres. There 
with water from the spring he washes the stelae and anoints 
them with myrrh; he slays a black bull, prays to Zeus and 
Hermes Chthonios, and invokes to the banquet and the blood- 
shed the heroes who died for Greece.’ 

The crimson-purple is blood colour’, hence it is ordained for 
the service of the dead. It has already been noted (p. 144) that 
Dion® when he took the great oath in the Thesmophorion identi- 
fied himself with Kore of the underworld by putting on her 
erimson robe and holding a burning torch. Purple, Pliny’ tells us, 
was employed when gods had to be appeased. 

1 Lue. dedomo18._ - 2 Lue. Hermot. 806. 

3 Aesch. Hum. 706. 4 Plut. Vit. Aristid. xx1. 

5 Cf. alware powédy (Il. xvt. 159). owds, pone and Pévos are not far asunder: 
cf. also the tragic use of afua for corpse. For purple in the ritual of the dead, 
see Diels, Sibyllinische Blitter, p. 69 note. 7 

6 Plut. Vit. Dion. ivr. repiBddrderae Thy moppuplda THs Peod Kal NaBav dada Karomevny 


amémvuot, 
7 Plin. N. H. rx. 60 purpura dis advocatur placandis. 


250 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cu. 


The purple robes, the torches, the night-time, above all the 
ogayva, point to a dread underworld ritual, a ritual that shows 
clearly that the darker side of the Venerable Ones was not far 
remote from the Erinyes. But Aeschylus, whose whole mind is 
bent on a doctrine of mercy, naturally emphasizes the brighter 
side of their functions and worship. Athene? herself knows that 
they are underworld goddesses, that they must have low-lying 
altars and underground dwellings; only so seated will they ever 
feel really at home. She remembers even that for their feast they 
must have the wineless sacrifice that drives them mad?; but she 
bids them leave this madness, and they for their part promise that 
the earth, their kingdom as vengeful ghosts, shall cease to drink 
the black blood of citizens. Henceforth they will be content with 
the white side of their service’. 

‘From this great land, thine is the sacrifice 


Of first-fruits offered for accomplishment 
Of marriage and for children’ 


Again Athene offers what was theirs from the beginning. 
Underworld goddesses _ presided 
over marriage: in later days, as 
Plutarch® tells us, it was the 
priestess of Demeter; earlier we 
can scarcely doubt it was the 
Semnae. Here they stand in 
sharp contrast to the Erinyes, who 
are all black. Who would have 
bidden an Erinys to a marriage 
feast 2? as well bid Eris who, in 
form (fig. 57) and function as 
perhaps in name, was but another 


Erinys, Eris 





Bic. 57. 


‘The Abominable, who uninvited came 
And cast the golden fruit upon the board.’ 


1 Aesch. Eum. 804. The significance of the écxydpa as distinguished from the 
Bwyuds has been already discussed (p. 61). 

2 Aesch. Hum. 860. 

3 Aesch. Hum. 980. 

4 y. 834, 

> Plut. Conj. Praec. Proem. pera rov marpiov Oeopuov bv vuiv h THs Ajunrpos i€pea 
TUVELpyVULEVOLS Eprpmooer. 


v| The ‘Semnai Theat’ 251 


The Erinyes transformed to Semnae ask Athene what spells 
they shall chant over the land. She makes answer’: 


‘Whatever charms wait on fair Victory 

From earth, from dropping dew and from high heaven, 
The wealth of winds that blow to hail the land 

Sunlit, and fruits of earth and teeming flocks 
Untouched of time, safety for human seed.’ 


The chorus accept these functions of health and life, and chant 
their promised guerdon®. 
‘No wind to wither trees shall blow, 
By our grace it shall be so; 
Nor that nor shrivelling heat 
On budding plants shall beat 
With parching drouth 
To waste their growth, 
Nor any plague of dismal blight come creeping ; 
But teeming, doubled flocks the earth 
In her season shall bring forth, 
And evermore a wealthy race 
Pay reverence for this our grace 
Of spirits that have the rich earth in their keeping.’ 


We are reminded that Ploutos himself, the Wealth of the 
underworld, had, according to Pausanias*, a statue in the precinct 
of the Venerable Goddesses. Moreover it is impossible to hear the 
words ‘no wind to wither trees shall blow’ without recalling the 
altar of the Wind-stillers (Evédaveyuor), which stood somewhere on 
the western slope of the Areopagos. Arrian‘, speaking of the 
statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, says ‘they stand at Athens 
in the Cerameicus where we go up to the citadel, just opposite 
the Metrdon not far from the altar of the Wind-stillers. Whoever 
has been initiated in the Eleusinia knows the altar of the Wind- 
stillers which stands on the ground.’ A low-lying altar doubtless, 
an eschara, for, as has already been shown (p. 65), the winds were 
to primitive thinking ghosts or caused by ghosts and worshipped 
with underworld sacrifices. Hesychius? tells us that there was at 
Corinth a family called the Wind-calmers. The Areopagos was a 


1 Aesch. Hum. 903. 

2 Aesch. Lum. 938. The translation offered only attempts to render the general 
sense of this difficult passage, a sense sufficiently clear for the immediate purpose. 
No satisfactory explanation has yet been offered of the enigmatic 7d uy mepav dpov 
Torwv, see Dr Verrall, ad loc. 

Sesh Heh (op 

4 Arrian, Anab. m1. 16. 8. 

5 Hesych. s.v. ’Avewoxoirac. 


Zo2 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cu. 


wind-swept hill. It was thence, according to a form of the legend 
recorded by Plato!, that Boreas caught up Oreithyia. 

The Semnae claim as their special ‘grace*’ control over the 
winds. As goddesses who bring the blessings of marriage and of 
fertile breezes, they are but good fructifying Keres lke the 
Tritopatores already discussed (p. 179); the Erinyes are blighting 
poisonous Keres, who Harpy-like foul the food by which men live. 


The Erinyes, in the play of Aeschylus, are transformed into 
Semnae, into the local goddesses of Athens. Of this there is no 
shadow of doubt. They accept the citizenship of Pallas*, and they 
are actually hailed as Semnae‘*. Aeschylus it is true never 
definitely states that they entered the cleft of the Areopagos, 
but Euripides, manifestly borrowing from him, is as has been 
seen explicit. 

Such a conversion may have been gratifying to the patriotism 
of an Athenian audience, but Athenian though he is, it is not the 
glorification of a local cult that inspires Aeschylus; it is the re- 
conciliation of the old order of vengeance with the new law of 
mercy. It is significant in this connection that Aeschylus, or 
some one who took his meaning, gave to the play the title, not as 
we should expect of Semnae, but of Humenides. The moral of the 
play is thereby emphasized. 

It is, to say the least, curious that a play called traditionally, 
if not by the author, the ‘Huwmenides’ should contain no single 
mention of the Eumenides by this name. Harpocration®, com- 
menting on the word Kumenides, says ‘Aeschylus in the Humenides, 
recounting what happened about the trial of Orestes, says that 
Athene, having mollified the Erinyes so that they did not deal 
harshly with Orestes, called them Eumenides.’ Aeschylus says no 
such thing. The text of the play contains no mention of the 
Eumenides, though in the hypothesis prefixed to the text occur 


! Plat. Phaedr. p. 229. The legend no doubt took its rise in the Areopagos, 
where the king’s daughter was flower-gathering, or fetching water from the 
Enneakrounos just outside the city gate. It was transplanted later with many 
another legend and cult to the banks of the Ilissus, outside the enlarged city. 

2 Aesch. Hum. 939. 

3 Aesch. Hum. 916 6é£ouar TaAXNados Evyorklay. 

4 vy. 1041 defp’ ire, ceuvat. Z , 

5 Harpocrat. s.v. Edmevides...Alaxvdos év Eimevicw elrwy ra wept rhv Kplow Thy 
’Opécrov pynoly ws 7H ’AOnva mpaivaca ras Epwias wore wh xaderds exew mpods Tov 
’Opéornv Evpevidas wrouacev, elat b€ ’ANnkTH, Méyatpa, Trorpdvy. 


PY] The Eumenides 253 


the following words: ‘ Having prevailed by the counsel of Athene, 
he (Orestes) went to Argos, and when he had mollified the 
Erinyes he addressed them as Eumenides'’ Harpocration attri- 
butes to Athene in the play what the hypothesis notes as done by 
Orestes in the sequel at Argos. By his use of the word ‘ mollified ’ 
(mpaiivaca) he betrays, I think, the source of his information. It 
must always be remembered that the Orestes legend was native 
to Argos and at Argos the local cult was of Eumenides not 
Semnae. 


THE EUMENIDES. 


The worship of divinities bearing the name of Eumenides, 
though unknown at Athens®, was wider-spread than that of the 
Semnae, which is found nowhere outside Attica. It was possibly 
for this reason that Aeschylus or later tradition gave this name 
to the play. The Semnae were familiar figures at Athens, and, 
spite of many underworld analogies, the shift from Erinyes to 
Semnae must have been a difficult one. A great deal is borne for 
the glory of the gods, but there must have been among the audience 
men conservative and hard-headed who would be likely to maintain 
that, all said and done, the Erinyes were not, could not be, Semnae. 
If asked to believe that the Erinyes became Eumenides, they 
would feel and probably say: that is a matter for Colonos, for 
Argos, for Sekyon to consider; it affects no Athenian’s faith or 
practice. At Colonos it is certain that goddesses were worshipped 
who bore the name of Eumenides, goddesses of function and ritual 
precisely identical with the Semnae, but addressed by a different 
cultus epithet. We have the express statement of Sophocles®, 
who, as a priest himself and a conservative, was not likely to 


1 Aesch. Hum. hypoth....7s Bouhy vixjoas katAAOev els “Apyos, Tas d€ ’Epiwias 
mpaivas tpocnyopevoey Eiuevidas. To suit the statement of Harpocration, rpaivas 
has been altered to rpaiivaca. 

2 There is no evidence that can be relied on to show that before Aeschylus wrote 
his play the Semnae ever bore the title of Eumenides. Pausanias indeed (vir. 25, 1) 
quotes an oracle from Dodona ostensibly belonging to the mythical days of 
Apheidas, in which the title Eumenides is given to the goddesses of the Areopagos, 

ppageo 6’ "Aperdy te mayov, Buyovs Te Auwders 

Hipevidwy ri. 
And this oracle, he says, the Greek called to mind when the Peloponnesians came 
against Athens in the time of Codrus. The passage stands alone, and oracle- 
mongering was rife at all times. 

3 Soph. Oed. Col. 41. 


254 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys  [cu. 


tamper with ritual titles. He makes Oedipus ask the stranger 
who they are whose dread name he is to invoke. The answer 
is explicit: 

‘ Eumenides all-seeing here the folk 

Would call them: other names please otherwhere.’ 

Sophocles no doubt shows the influence of Aeschylus in his 
‘other names please otherwhere. He realizes that Eumenides 
and Semnae are ‘one form of diverse names?” This truth it was 
the mission of the reconciling monotheist always to preach, but 
he would scarcely dare to tamper with the familiar titles of 
a local cult. In fact by this very statement, that elsewhere the 
goddesses bore other names, he makes the local appellation certain. 
He may indeed have brought Oedipus to Colonos rather than 
to the Areopagos, where he had also a grave, just because the 
local attributive title of the goddesses at Colonos suited the 
gentle moral of his play. 

Again when Oedipus asks to be taught to pray aright, the 
Chorus lay emphasis on the title Kumenides. 

‘That, as we call them Kindly, from kind hearts 
They may receive the suppliant?’ 

So strong is the exclusiveness of local cults that, had the title 
of Eumenides occurred only at Colonos, neither Aeschylus nor 
tradition would perhaps have ventured to assume it for the 
Semnae. But from Pausanias we learn of sanctuaries of the 
Eumenides at Titane® near Sekyon, at Cerynaea‘ in Achaia, and 
in Arcadia near Megalopolis®. The sanctuary between Sekyon 
and Titane consisted of a grove and a temple. Pausanias ex- 
pressly says these belonged to the goddesses whom the Athenians 
called Semnae and the Sikyonians Eumenides. The festival in 
their honour was a yearly one, and has already been discussed 
(p. 56). Tradition said that the sanctuary at Cerynaea was 
founded by Orestes, and that ‘if any one stained by blood or 
any other pollution, or impious, entered the sanctuary wishing 
to see it, he straightway went out of his wits by the terrors he 


1 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 209 
O€uts 
kai Tata mo\\Gyv dvoudrwrv moppy la. 
2 Oed. Col. 486 
as cpas Kadoduev Evjmevidas, €& evuevdv 
otépywv déxecBa Tov ixérny. 
SyPor L.A: 4 P. vu. 25. 7. & Pp. vin. 34, 2. 


Vv] The Eumenides 255 


beheld. The images in it were made of wood?...and they were not 
large. The ritual of the sanctuary at Megalopolis, with its black 
and white sides, addressed severally to the goddesses as Madnesses 
(Maniae) and Kindly Ones (Eumenides), has already been noted 
(p. 56). To the Madnesses Orestes sacrifices, it will be re- 
membered, with underworld rites to avert their wrath; to the 
Kindly Ones when healed, and after the same fashion as to the 
gods; the clearest possible instance of two stages of development 
in ritual and theology, of azrotpo77 side by side with Oepareia. 
To these four instances of the cult of the Eumenides a fifth 
may safely be added, the sanctuary at or near Argos. Of any 
such sanctuary we have no literary record, but we have what is 
of even greater value—monumental evidence. Three votive reliefs 
dedicated to the Eumenides have been found at the little church 
of Hag. Johannes, about half-an-hour to the east of the modern 
village of Argos”. They 
are still preserved in _ a E Wi 
the local museum of | sat 
the Demarchy. The im x \ NI 
material of all three is 
the hard local lime- 
stone, and they must 
have been set up in a 
local sanctuary. The 
sanctuary of Titane was 
nearly twenty miles 
away, too far to admit 
of any theory of trans- 
portation. All three 
are inscribed, and in 
each the dedicator is 
a woman. The relief 
reproduced in fig. 58 
was found built into |; 
the outside of the ney 
Church of Hag. Jo- 
hannes. It is clearly inscribed Evpeviow evxav, a vow or prayer 
to the Eumenides. The beginning of the inscription is lost, 
but enough remains, ..7 A..eéa, to show that a woman de- 


1 At this point unhappily a lacuna occurs. 2 A. Mitt. rv. 1879, pl. 1x. p. 176. 





256 Demonology of Ghosts, Sprites, Bogeys [0CH. Vv 


dicated it, and that she was probably an Argive. It is a woman’s 
offering, but she likes to have her husband carved upon it and 
she lets him walk first. Perhaps he went with her to the 
sanctuary and offered sacrifice of honey and water and flowers 
and a ewe great with young’. 

‘The first-fruits offered for accomplishment 

Of marriage and for children.’ 

About the figures of the Eumenides at Argos, as of the 
Semnae at Athens, ‘there is nothing frightful.’ These are not 
the short-girt huntress women of the vases, nor yet the loathly 
black horrors of tragedy; they are gentle, staid, matronly figures, 
bearing in their left hands, for tokens of fertility, flowers or fruit, 
and in their right, snakes? as the symbols, not of terror and 
torture, but merely of that source of wealth, the underworld ; 
but for the snakes, which lend a touch of austerity, they would 
be Charites (p. 297). From the inscriptions these ‘reliefs are 
certainly known to be later than Aeschylus, but because a poet 
writes a great play at Athens the local stonemason does not-alter 
the type of the votive offerings he supplies. Why should he 
frighten pious women and perhaps lose his custom? The Erinys 
of tragedy took strong hold of literature, but even at Athens 
there was a sceptic to whom the great conversion scene was merely 
absurd. If we may trust Suidas*, the comic poet Philemon held 
to it that ‘the Semnae were quite other than the Eumenides, 
and we may be sure that the humour of the situation attempted 
would lose nothing in his hands. Great though the influence of 
Aeschylus over the educated undoubtedly was, it was powerless 
to alter traditional types in art; equally powerless we may be 
sure to abate or alter one jot or one tittle of hieratic ceremonial. 
The Erinyes remained Erinyes, and in popular bogey form went, 
as has been seen (p. 232), to people with horrors a Christian hell. 
Man was not ready yet to worship only the Kindly Ones. For 
generations, nay centuries, he must bear the hard yoke of 
atrotpomy before he might offer to gods remade in his own image 
the free-will offering of a kindly @eparreia. 

1 The regular ritual offerings at Titane, see P. 1. 11. 4 and Aesch. Hum. 834. 

2 The archaic marble statuette found at Olympia and representing a woman 
with polos on her head and a snake in each hand may very possibly be one of three 
Kumenides. See Olympia, vol. 111. p. 27. 


3 Suidas s.v. Hvmevides: Piinuwy d€ 6 Kkwucxds érépas Pyol ras Deuwas Oeas rav 
Hipevidov. 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE MAKING OF A GODDESS. 
“oY fap fH FYNAaIKA MEMIMHTAI KYHCEl KAI FENNHCEl AAAA TYNH HN.’ 


In the last chapter we have traced the development from 
Keres to Erinyes, and have seen that, on the whole, this develop- 
ment was a downward course. The Erinyes are in a sense more 
civilized than the Keres; they are beings more articulate, more 
clearly outlined and concerned with issues moral rather than 
physical; but the career they start as angry souls they end as 
Poinae, ministers of vindictive torment; there is in them no 
element of hope, no kindly impulse towards purification, they 
end where they began as irreconcileable demons rather than 
friendly gods. 

We have further marked the attempt of Aeschylus to turn the 
vindictive demons of the old religion into the gentler divinities of 
the new, and we have seen that, for all his genius, the attempt 
failed wholly. The Erinyes never, save here and there to a 
puzzled antiquarian, became really Semnae; the popular instinct 
of their utter distinctness remained sound. We have now to note 
that, where the genius of a poet fails, the slow-moving widespread 
instinct of a people may prevail; ghosts are not wholly angry, and 
the gentler form of ghost may and does become a god. 

//The line between a spirit (Saiuwv) and a regular god (@eos) is 
drawn with no marked precision. / The difference is best realized 
by remembering the old principle that man makes all the objects 
of his worship in his own image, / Before he has himself clearly 
realized his own humanity—the line that marks him off from other 
animals, he makes his divinities sometimes wholly animal, some- 


H. ily 


258 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


times of mixed, monstrous shapes. His animal-shaped gods the 
Greek quickly outgrew ; something will be said of them when we 
come to the religion of the Bull-Dionysos. Mixed monstrous 
shapes long haunted his imagination ; bird-woman-souls, Gorgon- 
bogeys, Sphinxes, Harpies and the like were, as has been seen, 
the fitting vehicles of a religion that was mainly of vague fear. 
But as man became more conscious of his humanity and pari passu 
grew more humane, a more complete anthropomorphism steadily 
prevailed, and in the figures of wholly human gods man mirrored 
his gentler affections, his advance in the ordered relations of 
life. 

Xenophanes’, writing in the 6th century B.c., knew that God is 
‘without body, parts or passions, but he knew also that, till man 
becomes wholly philosopher, his gods are doomed perennially to 
take and retake human shape. His thrice-familiar words still bear 
repetition : 

‘One God there is greatest of gods and mortals ; 
Not like to man is he in mind or body. 

All of him sees, all of him thinks and hearkens 
But mortal man made gods in his own image 
Like to himself in vesture, voice and body. 

Had they but hands, methinks, oxen. and lions 


And horses would have made them gods like-fashioned, 
Horse-gods for horses, oxen-gods for oxen,’ 


teens 


We are apt to regard the advance to anthropomorphism as 
necessarily a clear religious gain. A gain it is in so far as a 
certain element of barbarity is softened or extruded, but with 
this gain comes loss, the loss of the element of formless, monstrous 
mystery. The ram-headed Knum of the Egyptians is to the mystic 
more religious than any of the beautiful divine humanities of the 
Greek. Anthropomorphism provides a store of lovely motives for 
art, but that spirit is scarcely religious which makes of Eros a boy 
trundling a hoop, of Apollo a youth aiming a stone at a lizard, of + 
Nike a woman who stoops to tie her sandal. Xenophanes put 
his finger on the weak spot of anthropomorphism. He saw that 
it comprised and confined the god within the limitations of the 
worshipper. It is not every religion that advances as far as 
anthropomorphism, but the farthest of anthropomorphism is not 
very far. 


1 Xenoph. frg. 1, 2, 5 and 6. 


a 


VI] Anthropomorphism 259 


Traces of animal form are among the recognized Greek gods 
few and scattered. Pausanias! heard at Phigaleia of a_horse- 
headed Demeter, and again of a fish-bodied Eurynome? whom 
some called Artemis, but for the most part by the 6th and 5th 
centuries B.c. mixed forms, half animal, half human, belong to 
beings half-way between man and god, demons rather than full- 
fledged divinities and demons malignant rather than beneficent. 
Such are Boreas, Echidna, Typhon and the snake-tailed giants. 

In the design from a black-figured cylix* in fig. 59 we have a 
curious and rare instance of beings of monstrous form, yet obviously 





Fie. 59. 


beneficent. The scene is a vineyard at the time of vintage. On 
the reverse (not figured here) we have the same vintage-setting, 
but goats, the destroyers of the vine, are nibbling at the vine- 
stems. On the obverse (fig. 59) we have snake-bodied nymphs 
rejoicing in the grape harvest. Two of them hold a basket of net 
or wicker in which the grapes will be gathered, a third holds a 
great cup for the vine-juice, a fourth plays on the double flutes. 
Unhappily we can give no certain name to these kindly grape- 


1 P, vr. 42.4. The material for the study of the non-human forms taken by 
Greek gods has been recently collected by Dr M. W. de Visser, Die nichi-men- 
schengestaltigen Gitter der Griechen, 1903. 

2 Pp. vin. 41. 6. 

3 Munich. Published and discussed by Dr Béhlan, ‘Schlangenleibige Nymphen,’ 
Philologos tvu, N.F. xt. 1, and see ‘ Delphika,’ J.H.S. x1x. 1899, p. 216, note 1. 


17—2 


260 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


gathering, flute-playing snake-nymphs. They are dpaxovtodecs 
kopat, but assuredly they are not Erinyes and we dare not even 
call them Eumenides. Probably any Athenian child would have 
named them without a moment’s hesitation, but we must be 
content to say that, in their essence, they are Charites, givers 
of grace and increase, and that their snake-bodies mark them not 
as malevolent, but as earth-daemons, genu of fertility. They are 
near akin to the local Athenian hero, the snake-tailed Cecrops, 
and we are tempted to conjecture that in art, though not in 
literature, he may have lent his snake-tail to the Agraulid 
nymphs, his daughters. Later it will be seen that earth-born 
goddesses, though they shed their snake-form, keep as their 
vehicle and attribute the snake they once were. 


THE MOTHER AND THE MAID. 


The gods reflect not only man’s human form but also his 
human relations. In the Homeric Olympus we see mirrored a 
family group of the ordinary patriarchal type, a type so familiar 
that it scarcely arrests attention. Zeus, Father of Gods and men, 
is supreme; Hera, though in constant and significant revolt, 
occupies the subordinate place of a wife; Poseidon is a younger 
brother, and the rest of the Olympians are grouped about Zeus 
and Hera in the relation of sons and daughters. These sons and 
daughters are quarrelsome among themselves and in constant 
insurrection against father and mother, but still they constitute 
a family, and a family subject, if reluctantly, to the final authority 
of a father. 

But when we come to examine local cults we find that, if these 
mirror the civilization of the worshippers, this civilization is 
quite other than patriarchal. Hera, subject im the Homeric 
Olympus, reigns alone at Argos; Athene at Athens is no god’s 
wife, she is affiliated in some loose fashion to Poseidon, but the 
relation is one of rivalry and ultimate conquest, nowise of sub- 
ordination. At Eleusis two goddesses reign supreme, Demeter 
and Kore, the Mother and the Maid; neither Hades nor Tripto- 
lemos their nursling ever disputes their sway. At Delphi in 


VI] The Mother and the Maid 261 


_ historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess? 
knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses : 
‘First in my prayer before all other gods 
I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess. 
Next Themis on her mother’s oracular seat 
Sat, so men say. Third by unforced consent 
Another Titan, daughter too of Earth, 
Phoebe. She gave it as a birthday gift 
To Phoebus, and giving called it by her name.’ 

Gaia the Earth was first, and elsewhere Aeschylus? tells us 
that Themis was but another name of Gaia. Prometheus says the 
future was foretold him by his mother: 

‘Themis she 
And Gaia, one in form with many names.’ 

In historical days in Greece, descent was for the most part 
traced through the father. These primitive goddesses reflect 
another condition of things, a relationship traced through the 
mother, the state of society known by the awkward term matri- 
archal*, a state echoed in the lost Catalogues of Women, the 
Foiai of Hesiod, and in the Boeotian heroines of the Nekuia. 
Our modern patriarchal society focusses its religious anthropo- 
morphism on the relationship of the father and the son; the 
Roman Church with her wider humanity includes indeed the 
figure of the Mother who is both Mother and Maid, but she is 
still in some sense subordinate to the Father and the Son. 

Of the many survivals of matriarchal notions in Greek myth- 
ology one salient instance may be noted. St Augustine’, telling 
the story of the rivalry between Athene and Poseidon, says that 
the contest was decided by the vote of the citizens, both men and 
women, for it was the custom then for women to take part in 
public affairs. The men voted for Poseidon, the women for 
Athene; the women exceeded the men by one and Athene prevailed. 
To appease the wrath of Poseidon the men inflicted on the women 
a triple punishment, ‘they were to lose their vote, their children 
were no longer to be called by their mother’s name and they 


1 Aesch. Hum. 1. 2 Aesch. Prom. Vinct. 209. 

3 The clearest and most scientific statement of the facts as to this difficult 
subject known to me is to be found in an article by Dr E. B. Tylor, ‘The Matri- 
archal family system,’ Nineteenth Century, July 1896. wa 

4S. Aubustine, De civitat. Dei 18. 9 ut nulla ulterius ferrent suffragia, ut 
nullus nascentium maternum nomen acciperet, ut ne quis eas Athenaeas vocaret. 


262 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


themselves were no longer to be called after their goddess, 
Athenians.’ 

The myth is aetiological, and it mirrors surely some shift in 
the social organization of Athens. The citizens were summoned 
by Cecrops, and it is noticeable that with his name universal 
tradition associates the introduction of the patriarchal form of 
marriage. Athenaeus’ quoting from Clearchos, the pupil of 
Aristotle, says, ‘At Athens Cecrops was the first to join one 
woman to one man: before connections had taken place at random 
and marriages were in common—hence, as some think, Cecrops 
was called “ Twy-formed” (dzdurs), since before his day people did 
not know who their fathers were, on account of the number 
(of possible parents). A society that had passed to patriarchy 
naturally misjudged the marriage-laws of matriarchy and regarded 
it as a mere state of promiscuity. Cecrops, tradition? said, was 
the first to call Zeus the Highest, and with the worship of Zeus 
the Father it is possible that he introduced the social conditions 
of patriarchy. Apollo, the son of Zeus, was worshipped at Athens 
as Patroos. 

The primitive Greek was of course not conscious that he 
mirrored his own human relations in the figures of his gods, but, 
in the reflective days of Pythagoras, the analogy between human 
and divine was not left unnoted. The evidence he adduces as to 
the piety of women is perhaps the most illuminating comment on 
primitive theology ever made by ancient or modern. ‘ Women, 
he® says, ‘give to each successive stage of their life the same 
name as a god, they call the unmarried woman Maiden (Képn), the 
woman given in marriage to a man Bride (Nvydy), her who has 
borne children Mother (Myrnp), and her who has borne children’s 
children Grandmother (Maia). Invert the statement and we have 
the whole matriarchal theology in a nutshell. The matriarchal 
goddesses reflect the life of women, not women the life of the 
goddesses. 

Of these various forms of the conditions of woman, woman as 
maiden, bride, mother and grandmother, the last, grandmother, 

1 Athen. xur. 2 § 555 and Tzetzes Chil. v. 19. 650. Other instances of the 
survival in Greek mythology of traces of matriarchal conditions are collected by 
Bachofen in his Mutterrecht, a book which, spite of the wildness of its theories, 


remains of value as the fullest existing collection of ancient facts. 
SRP VIEL. (2shd. % Diog. 8. 1, 10, and Iambl. Vit. Pyth. 3. 11. 


VI] The Lady of the Wild Things 263 


comes little into prominence; it only Jends a name to Maia, the 
mother of Hermes. Nymphs we have everywhere, but the two 
cardinal conditions are obviously to a primitive society Mother! and 
Maiden. When these conditions crystallized into the goddess forms 
of Demeter and Kore, they appear as Mother and Daughter, but 
primarily the conditions expressed are Mother and Maid, woman 
mature and woman before maturity, and of these two forms the 
Mother-form as more characteristic is, in early days, the more 
prominent ; Kore as daughter rather than maiden is the product of 
mythology. When we come to the religion of Dionysos, it will be 
seen that the Mother-goddess has for her attribute of motherhood 
a son rather than a daughter. 


THE EARTH-MOTHER AS KARPOPHOROS OR LADY OF THE 
WILD THINGS. 


The Mother-goddess was almost necessarily envisaged as the 
Earth. The ancient Dove-priestesses at Dodona? were the first to 
chant the Litany : 


‘Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be, O great Zeus. 
Earth sends up fruits, so praise we Earth the Mother.’ 


The two lines have no necessary connection; it may be 
that their order is inverted and that long before the Dove- 
priestesses sang the praises of Zeus they had chanted their hymn 
to the Mother. It was fitting that women, priestesses,should sing 
to a woman, goddess, to Ga who was also Ma. Mother-Earth bore 
not only fruits but the race of man. As the poet Asius? said: 

‘Divine Pelasgos on the wood-clad hills 
Black Earth brought forth, that mortal man might be.’ 

Pelasgos claimed no father, but he, the first father, had a 
mother. And here it must be noted that the local mother must 
necessarily have preceded Gaia the abstract and universal. Primi- 


1 The fundamental unity of all the Greek goddesses was, I think, first observed 
by Gerhard, Ueber Metroon und Goetter-Mutter, 1849, p. 103, but his illuminating 
suggestion has been obscured for half a century by systems, such as that of Preller 
and Max Miller, that see in ancient deities impersonations of natural phenomena. 

Bape ee LO 

Leis qv, Leds éorl, Leds éooerar’ & weydde Zed. 
TG xaprovs dvie, 6d K\yfeTe wnTépa yaar. 


35P; vit. 2. 4. 


264 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


tive man does not tend to deal in abstractions. Each local hero 
claimed descent from a local earth-nymph or mother?. Salamis, 
Aegina and ‘dear mother Ida’ are not late geographical abstrac- 
tions ; each is a local mother, a real parent, and all are later merged 
in the great All-Mother Ge. 

The Earth-Mother and each and every local nymph was mother 
not only of man but of all 
creatures that live; she is 
the ‘Lady of the Wild 
Things’ (aotvia O@npor). 
Art brings her figure very 
clearly before us. On an 
early stamped Boeotian 
amphora’ in the National 
Museum at Athens (figs. 
60 and 61) she is vividly 
presented. The Great 
Mother stands with up- | 
lifted hands exactly in the 
attitude of the still earlier 
figures recently discovered 
in the Mycenaean shrine 
at'Cnossos. To either side 
of her is a lion, heraldically 
posed like the lions of the 
Gate at Mycenae; below 
her is a frieze of deer. 
The figure is supported or 
rather encircled by two Fic. 60. 
women figures, one at 
either side. These seem to be part of a ring of encircling 
worshippers®. 








1 The distinction has been acutely observed by Miss W. M. L. Hutchinson 
in discussing the earthborn parentage of Aeacus, see deacus a Judge of the Under- 
world, p. 6. 

*"Eopyjueps “Apx. 1892, Pl. 9; for stamped Boeotian amphorae in general, 
see Mr A. de Ridder, Bull. de Corr. Hell. xx11. 1898, p. 440, 

® Dr Wolters (Ed. ’Apx. 1892, p. 225) explains the figure of the Earth-Mother 
as Artemis Aeyd. I entirely agree with Prof. 8. Wide that her pose is not that of 
‘eine gebiirende Frau’: see 8S. Wide, ‘ Mykenische Gétterbilder und Idole,’ A. Mitt. 
xxvi. 1901, p. 253. 


VI] The Lady of the Wild Things 265 


CE PROPER lt 


Pete 





isto ee an mina oem rne Fea EN 


cree 61. 


The design in fig. 62 from a painted Boeotian amphora’, also in 


q J TR 


$65. 


Am 





Fic. 62 


the Museum at Athens, shows a similar and even more complete 
conception of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things. Her two lions still 


1 Eg. ’Apx. 1892, Pl. 10. 1. 


266 The Making of « Goddess * TEE 


keep heraldic guard, above her outstretched arms are two birds’, 
her gown is decorated with the figure of a great fish. We are 
reminded of the Eurynome of Phigalia with her fish-tailed body. 

The interesting thing about these early representations, these 
and countless others, is that we can give the goddess no proper 
name. We call her rightly the Great Mother and the ‘ Lady of 
the Wild Things, but farther we cannot go. She has been named 
Artemis and Cybele, but for neither name is there a particle of 
evidence. 

The Great Mother is mother of the dead as well as the living. 
The design in fig. 63 is from the interior of a rock-hewn tomb 


Ceiling 
I = 


"ts 





Line of Floor 
Fic. 63. 


in Phrygia®. The great figure of the Mother and her lions occupies 
the whole height of the back wall of the tomb. ‘All things,’ 
as Cicero*® says, ‘go back to earth and rise out of the earth.’ 


1 On the head of one of the idols in the recently discovered shrine at Cnossos, 


Mr Arthur Evans kindly tells me, is perched a dove, a forecast it may be of 
Aphrodite. 


2 See Prof. Ramsay, J.H.S. 1884, p. 245. 
® Cie. De Nat. Deor. u. 26 et recidunt omnia in terras et oriuntur e terris. 


VI] The Mother as Kourotrophos 267 


‘Dust we are, and unto dust we shall return, and more tenderly 
Aeschylus’: 

‘Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life 

And rears and takes again into her womb.’ 
And so the Mother herself keeps ward in the metropolis of the 
dead, and therefore ‘the Athenians of old called the dead “ Demeter’s 
people”*®’ On the festival day of the dead, the Nekusia at Athens, 
they sacrificed to Earth. To a people who practised inhumation, 
such ritual and such symbolism were almost inevitable. When the 
Earth-Mother developed into the Corn-Mother, such symbolism 
gained new life and force from the processes of agriculture. 
Cicero® records that in his day it was still the custom to sow 
the graves of the dead with corn: ‘that which thou sowest is not 
quickened except it die*’ Out of the symbolism of the corn sown 
the Greeks did not develope a doctrine of immortality, but, when 
that doctrine came to them from without, the symbolism of the 


seed lay ready to hand. 


THE MOTHER AS KOUROTROPHOS. 


Early art figures the Mother in quaint instructive fashion 
as Kourotrophos, the Child-Rearer. As such she appears in the 
design in fig. 64 taken from an early black-figured amphora of 
the 6th century B.c. in the British Museum’*. This figure of 
the Mother is usually explained as Leto with the twins Apollo 
and Artemis, but such an interpretation is, I think, over-bold, 
and really misleading. The artist knows that there is a Mother- 
Goddess; one child would be sufficient as an attribute of mother- 
hood, but in his quaint primitive fashion he wishes to emphasise 
her motherhood, he gives her all the children she can conveniently 
hold, one on each shoulder. 


1 Aesch. Choeph. 127. 

2 Plut. de fac. in orb. lun. 28 Kai rods vexpovs “A@nvaioe Anunrpelious wvduafov 7d 
maNatov. 

3 Cic. Legg. 1. 22, and 25, 63. 4 1 Cor. xv. 36. 

5 B. M. Cat. B 213. Inghirami, Vasi Fitt. m1. 300. Mr A. Lang, Homeric 
Hymns, plate facing p. 104, names the design ‘Leto with her infants Apollo and 
Artemis.’ The catalogue of the British Museum with just caution says ‘Leto (?),’ 
but adds that the children are ‘probably Apollo and Artemis.’ The figures to 
either side of the central ‘Mother,’ Dionysos and a Satyr, give no clue to the 
interpretation. 


268 The Making of « Goddess [ CH. 


We have no right to name the children Apollo and Artemis, 
unless inscribed or marked as such by attributes. This is clear 
from the fact that, on a frag- 
ment of a vase found in the 
Acropolis excavations and un- 
happily still unpublished, we 
have a figure closely analo- 
gous, though later in style, to 
our Kourotrophos, bearing on 
her elbows two little naked 
imps who are inscribed: the 
one is Himeros, the other 
E(vos). The mother can in 
this case be none other than 
Aphrodite. The attribution 
is confirmed by another frag- 
ment! in which only half of 
the Mother-goddess is_pre- 
served and one child seated 
on her elbow; the child is 
not inscribed, but against the 
mother, in archaic letters, is 
written Aphrodite); near her 
as on our vase is standing 





Fic. 64. 


Dionysos. 

Pausanias”, when examin- 
ing the chest of Cypselos, saw a design on which was represented 
‘a woman carrying a white boy sleeping on her right arm; on the 
other arm she has a black boy who is like the one who is asleep; 
they both have their feet twisted (audorépous SverTpappévous 
Tovs 7rooas); the inscriptions show that the boys are Death and 
Sleep, and that Night is the nurse of both.’ He adds the rather 
surprising statement that it ‘would have been easy to see who 
they were without the inscriptions.’ 

A woman with a child on each arm can then represent 
Aphrodite with Himeros and Eros; if one child is white and 

1 Mr G. C. Richards, J.H.S. xu. 1892, p. 284, pl. x1. 

2 Pp. vy. 18. 1. Dr Frazer translates the difficult word deorpaupévous ‘ turned 


different ways’; the word seems usually to imply distortion, but in the case of Death 
and Sleep this seems inappropriate. 





Vii Lourotrophos 269 
asleep and the other black, the group represents Night with 
Death and Sleep; if the group is to represent Leto and her 
twins, there must be something to mark the twins as Apollo 
and Artemis. On another amphora in the British Museum! there 
does exist just the necessary differentiation: the child on the left 
arm is naked, the child on the right though also painted black 
wears a short chiton. We are justified in supposing that the one 
is a boy the other a girl, and there is at least a high probability 
that the differentiation of sex points to Apollo and Artemis. 

I have dwelt on this poimt because vase-paintings are here, as 
so often, highly instructive in the matter of the development and 
slow differentiation and articulation of theological types. At first 
all is vague and misty; there is, as it were, a blank formula, a 
mother-goddess characterized by twins. If we give her a name at 
all she is Kourotrophos. As her personality grows she differ- 
entiates, she is Aphrodite with Eros and Himeros, she is Night 
with Sleep and Death. When Apollo and Artemis came from the 
North they became the twins par excellence, and they are affiliated 
to the old religion; the Mother as Kourotrophos became Leto with » 
Apollo and Artemis. 

The like process goes on in literature, though it is less obviously 
manifest. At the opening of the Thesmophoria the Woman-Herald 
in Aristophanes? makes proclamation as follows : 

‘Keep solemn silence. Keep solemn silence. Pray to the two Thesmo- 
phoroi, to Demeter, and to Kore, and to Plouton, and to Kalligeneia, and to 
Kourotrophos, and to Hermes, and the Charites.’ 

Discussion from the time of the scholiast onwards has raged 
as to who Kourotrophos is—is she Hestia, is she Ge? The simple 
truth is never faced that she is Kouwrotrophos, an attribute become 
a personality. Her personality, it is true, faded before the dominant 
personality of the Mother of Eleusis, but her presence in the 
ancient ritual-formulary speaks clearly for her original actuality. 
Once she had faded, all the other more successful goddesses, Ge, 
Artemis, Hekate, Leto, Demeter, Aphrodite, even Athene, contend 
for her name as their epithet. There is no controversy so idle and 
apparently so prolific as that which seeks to find in these ancient 


1 B. M. Cat. B 168. ; 
2 Ar. Thesm. 295 and schol. ad loc, The words 77 I'7 have been interpolated 
after Kouvporpd¢w but without ms. authority. 


270 The Making of a Goddess [ OH. 


inchoate personalities, such as Kourotrophos and Kailigeneia, the 
epithets of the Olympians they so long predated. 


The figure of the Mother as Kourotrophos lent itself éasily to 
later abstractions. Themis is one of the earliest, and she attains 
a real personality; her sisters Eunomia and Dike are scarcely flesh 
and blood, they are beautiful stately shadows. The ‘making of a 
goddess’ is always a mystery, the outcome of manifold causes of 
which we have lost count. At the close of the 5th century B.C. at 
the end of the weary, fatal Peloponnesian war, Eirene, Peace, almost 
attained godhead, and godhead as the Mother. Cephisodotos, father 
of Praxiteles, made for the market-place at Athens a statue of her 
carrying the child Ploutos, the 
Athenians built her an altar 
and did sacrifice to her, Aristo- 
phanes brings her on the stage, f 
but it is all too late and in vain, f f eh NAP 


she remains an abstraction as | ETEP. ES 
lifeless as Theoria or Opora, ae 


and finds no place among the 
humanities of Olympus. 

Tyche, Fortune, another late 
abstraction of the Mother, 
though she is scarcely more 
human than Eirene, obtained a 
wide popularity. Pausanias! 
saw at Thebes a sanctuary of 
Tyche; he remarks after naming 
the artists, ‘it was a clever 
plan of them to put Ploutos in 
the arms of Tyche as his mother 
or nurse, and Cephisodotos was 
no less clever; he made for the 
Athenians the image of Eirene holding Ploutos.’ 

These abstractions, Tyche, Ananke and the like, were popular 
with the Orphics. Their very lack of personality favoured a 
growing philosophic monotheism. The design in fig. 65 is carved 
in low relief on one of the columns of the Hall of the Mystae of 


Uap Tix does 











re 
- i 


iy. a 
VI] Demeter and Kore 271 


a 


Dionysos, recently excavated at Melos. Tyche holds a child— 
presumably the local Ploutos of Melos—in her arms. Above her 
is inscribed, ‘May Agathe Tyche of Melos be gracious to 
Alexandros, the founder of the holy Mystae.’ Tyche, Fortune, 
might be, to the uninitiated, the Patron, the Good Luck of any 
and every city, but to the mystic she had another and a deeper 
meaning ; she, like the Agathos Daimon, was the inner Fate of his 
life and soul. In her house, as will later be seen (Chap. x1.), he 
lodged, observing rules of purity and abstinence before he was 
initiated into the underworld mysteries of Trophonios, before he 
drank of the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne. It is one of the 
countless instances in which the Orphics went back behind the 
Olympian divinities and mysticized the earlier figures of the 
Mother or the Daughter. 


DEMETER AND KORE. 


So long as and wherever man lived for the most part by 
hunting, the figure of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ would 
content his imagination. But, when he became an agriculturist, 
the Mother-goddess must perforce be, not only Kourotrophos of all 
living things, but also the Corn-mother, Demeter. 

The derivation of the name Demeter has been often discussed*. 
The most popular etymology is that which makes her Aapnrnp, 
Earth-mother, Ad, which occurs in such interjections® as ded 64, 
oiot Oa, being regarded as the equivalent of Ta. From the point 
of view of meaning this etymology is’ nowise satisfactory. 
Demeter is not the Earth-Mother, not the goddess of the earth in 
general, but of the fruits of the civilized, cultured earth, the tilth ; 
not the ‘Lady of the Wild Things, but She-who-bears-fruits, 
Karpophoros. Mannhardt was the first to point out another 
etymology, more consonant with this notion. The author of the 


1 Mr R. C. Bosanquet, ‘Excavations of the British School at Melos,’ J.H.S. xvm1. 
1898, p. 60, Fig. 1, and Dr P. Wolters, ‘ Melische Kultstatuen,’ 4. Mitt. xv. 1890, 
. 248. 
4 2 All the proposed etymologies, possible and impossible, are collected by Mann- 
hardt, Mythologische Forschungen, p. 287. To his discussion must now be added 
Dr Kretschmer’s view that A@ like Ma means mother and that the form Aayarnp 
arose when Aé@ had crystallized into a proper name. See Festschrift der Wiener- 


- Studien, 1902, p. 291. 


3 Aesch, Prom. Vinct. 568. 


272 The Making of « ‘Goddess [ CH. 


Etymologicon Magnum’, after stringing together a whole series of 
senseless conjectures, at last stumbles on what looks like the truth. 
‘Deo, he says, ‘may be derived from tas dnas, for barley grains 
are called by the Cretans dnai. The Cretan word dnai is near 
akin to the ordinary Greek fe1a, the word used for a coarse wheat 
or spelt; the fruitful field in Homer* bears the epithet feidwpos, 
‘spelt-yielding.’ Demeter, it will later be seen (p. 565), probably 
came from Crete, and brought her name with her; she is the 
Earth, but only in this limited sense, as ‘Grain-Mother.’ 

To the modern mind it is surprising to find the processes of 
agriculture conducted in the main by women, and mirroring them- 
selves in the figures of women-goddesses. But in days when man 
was mainly concerned with hunting and fighting it was natural 
enough that agriculture and the ritual attendant on it should fall 
to the women. Moreover to this social necessity was added, and still 
is among many savage communities, a deep-seated element of super- 
stition. ‘Primitive man, Mr Payne® observes, ‘ refuses to interfere 
_in agriculture; he thinks it magically dependent for success on 
woman, and connected with child-bearing. ‘When the women 
plant maize, said the Indian to Gumilla, ‘the stalk produces two 
or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce 
children. They only know how to plant corn to ensure its germi- 
nating. Then let them plant it, they know more than we know.’ 
Such seems to have been the mind of the men of Athens who sent 
their wives and daughters to keep the Thesmophoria and work 
their charms and ensure fertility for crops and man. 

It was mainly in connection with agriculture, 1t would seem, 
that the Earth-goddess developed her double form as Mother 
and Maid. The ancient ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ is both in one 
or perhaps not consciously either, but at Eleusis the two figures 
are clearly outlined ; Demeter and Kore are two persons though 
one god. They take shape very charmingly in the design in 
fig. 66, from an early red-figured skyphos‘, found at Eleusis. To 
the left Demeter stands, holding in her left hand her sceptre, 
while with her right she gives the corn-ears to her nursling, 

1 Etym. Mag. s.v. And sub fin.: 7 Anw, mapa ras nds: otrw yap Snal mporayopet- 
ovat bro Kpnrav ai xpubal. 

* Hom. Il, 11. 528 Feldwpos dpovpa. 


% History of the New World, vol. 1. p. 7. 
4 O. Rubensohn, ‘ Eleusinische Beitrige,’ A. Mitth. 1899, pl. vit. 


a! 


cal \ 
f ¥1| Demeter and Kore 273 





Triptolemos, who holds his ‘crooked plough. Behind is Kore, 
the maiden, with her simple chiton for dress, and her long flowing 





Fic. 66. 


hair, and the torches she holds as Queen of the underworld. Mother 
and Maid in this picture are clearly distinguished, but not infre- 
quently, when both appear together, it is impossible to say which 
is which. 


The relation of these early matriarchal, husbandless goddesses, 
whether Mother or Maid, to the male figures that accompany them 
is one altogether noble and womanly, though perhaps not what 
the modern mind holds to be feminine. It seems to halt some- 
where half-way between Mother and Lover, with a touch of the 
patron saint. Aloof from achievement themselves, they choose a 
local hero for their own to inspire and protect. They ask of him, 
not that he should love or adore, but that he should do great deeds. 
Hera has Jason, Athene Perseus, Herakles and Theseus, Demeter 
and Kore Triptolemos. And as their glory is in the hero’s high 
deeds, so their grace is his guerdon. With the coming of patriarchal 
conditions this high companionship ends. The women goddesses 
are sequestered to a servile domesticity, they become abject and 


_ amorous. 


H. 18 


274 The Making of « Goddess * [OH 


It is important to note that primarily the two forms of the 
Earth or Corn-goddess are not Mother and Daughter, but Mother 
and Maiden, Demeter and Kore. They are, in fact, merely the 
older and younger form of the same person, hence their easy con- 
fusion. The figures of the Mother and Daughter are mythological 
rather than theological, 1e. they arise from the story-telling 
instinct : 


‘Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, I sing, 

She and the slender-ancled maid, her daughter, whom the king 
Aidoneus seized, by Zeus’ decree. He found her, as she played 
Far from her mother’s side, who reaps the corn with golden blade!’ 


The corn is reaped and the earth desolate in winter-time. 
Aetiology is ready with a human love-story. The maiden, the 
young fruit of the earth, was caught bya lover, kept for a season, 
and in the spring-time returns to her mother; the mother is com- 
forted, and the earth blossoms again’: 


‘Thus she spake, and then did Demeter the garlanded yield 

And straightway let spring up the fruit of the loamy field, 

And all the breadth of the earth, with leaves and blossoming things 
Was heavy. Then she went forth to the law-delivering kings 

And taught them, Triptolemos first.’ 


Mythology might work its will, but primitive art never clearly 
distinguished between the Mother and the Maid, never lost hold 
of the truth that they were one goddess. On the Boeotian plate* 
in fig. 67 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or 
Maid it is difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She 
is a great goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high 
polos on her head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch ; 
before her is an omphalos-like altar, on it what looks like a pome- 
granate—is she Demeter or Persephone? I incline to think she 
is both in one; the artist has not differentiated her. 


1 Hom. Hymn. ad Cer. 1. 

2 Hom. Hymn. ad Cer. 470. The elaborate aetiology of the whole Homeric 
Hymn to Demeter has been fully examined and explained by Mr F. B. Jevons in 
his Introduction to the History of Religion, ch. xxi. and Appendix. — 

3 Athens Nat. Mus. 484. Fig. 67 is reproduced from a photograph kindly sent 
me by Prof. Sam. Wide. For further particulars of this class of vases I must refer 
to Prof. Wide’s article ‘Hine lokale Gattung Boiotischer Gefiisse,’ A. Mitt. xxvr. 1901, 
p. 148. Prof. Wide makes the interesting suggestion that the bird in the field is 
a bird-soul and points out that merely decorative ‘ Fiillfiguren’ do not occur on this 
class of vases. This interpretation seems to me highly probable, but till further 
evidence emerges, I hesitate to adopt it as certain. 


VI] ; Demeter and Kore 275 


The dead, according to Plutarch’s! statement, were called by 
the Athenians ‘ Demeter’s people.’ The ancient ‘ Lady of the Wild 






= 


(CA AA | 

CL aN 
PRAANN 

AN Fastin 


CLF 
mn 77 40) BBD) BIESEAL TIN 


se 
0 


Fie. 67. 


Things, with her guardian lions, keeps ward over the dead in the 
tombs of Asia Minor, and every grave became her sanctuary. But 
in Greece proper, and especially at Eleusis, where the Mother and 
the Maid take mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and 
her daughter Persephone, their individual functions tend more and 
more to specialize. Demeter becomes more and more agricultural, 
more and more the actual corn. As Plutarch? observes—with full 
consciousness of the anomalous blend of the human and the 
physical—a poet can say of the reapers: 


‘What time men shear to earth Demeter’s limbs.’ : 


The Mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual | 
—the Mother is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of 
the underworld. 

Demeter as Thesmophoros has for her sphere more and 
more the things of this life, laws and civilized marriage; she 
grows more and more human and kindly, goes more and more 


1 Plut. de fac. in orb. lun. xxv. 
2 Plut. de Is. et Osir. LXVI. mourns 5é Tis Eri Tay OepifdvTwy ‘THuos dr’ aignol 
Anunrepa KwoTometot.’ 


18—2 


oak ane hea i dll f 


276 The Making of d Goddess [ CH. 


over to the humane Olympians, till in the Homeric Hymn she, the 
Earth-Mother, ig an actual denizen of Olympus. The Daughter, 
at first but the young form of the mother, is in maiden fashion 
sequestered, even a little farowche; she withdraws herself more 
and more to the kingdom of the spirit, the things below and 
beyond : 


‘She waits for each and other, 
She waits for all men born, 
Forgets the earth her mother, 
The life of fruits and corn. 
And spring and seed and swallow 
Take wing for her and follow 
Where summer song rings hollow 
And flowers are put to scorn.’ 
And in that kingdom aloof her figure waxes as the figure of 


the Mother wanes: 


‘O daughter of earth, my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, 

I am also I also thy brother, I go as I came unto earth,’ 

She passes to a place unknown of the Olympians, her kingdom 
is not of this world. 


‘Thou art more than the Gods, who number the days of our temporal breath, 
For these give labour and slumber, but thou, Proserpina, Death.’ 

All this is matter of late development. At first we have 
merely the figures of the Two Goddesses, the Two Thesmophoroi, 
the Two Despoinae. Demeter at Hermione is Chthonia, in 
Arcadia! she is at once Erinys and Lousia. But it is not sur- 
prising that, as will later be seen, a religion like Orphism, which 
concerned itself with the abnegation of this world and the life of 
the soul hereafter, laid hold rather of the figure of the underworld 
Kore, and left the prosperous, genial Corn-Mother to make her 
way alone into Olympus. 


THE ANODOS OF THE MAIDEN EARTH-GODDESSES. 


In discussing the Boeotian plate (fig. 67), it has been seen 
that it is not easy always to distinguish in art the figures of the 
Mother and the Maid. A lke difficulty attends the mterpretation 
of the series of curious representations of the earth-goddess now 
to be considered (figs. 68—72). 


1 Pp, vir. 25. 4—7. 





X is an 
VI] The Anodos of the Maiden 277 


We begin with the vase-painting in fig. 68, where happily an 
inscription makes the interpretation certain. The design is from 
a red-figured krater, now in the Albertinum Museum at Dresden’. 
To the right is a conventional earth-mound (yopa yijs). In front 





Spe 


= a 
} 





of it stands Hermes. He holds not his kerykeion, but a rude 
forked rhabdos. It was with the rhabdos, it will be remembered 
(p. 44), that he summoned the souls from the grave-pithos. 
Here, too, he is present as Psychagogos ; he has come to summon 
an earth-spirit, nay more, the Earth-goddess herself. Out of the 
artificial mound, which symbolizes the earth itself, rises the figure 
of a woman. At first sight we might be inclined to call her Ge, 
the Earth-Mother, but the figure is slight and maidenly, and over 
her happily is written (Phe)rophatta. It is the Anodos of Kore— 
the coming of the goddess is greeted by an ecstatic dance of goat- 


1 Jahrbuch d. Inst. Anz. 1893, p. 166. 


278 The Making of « Goddess [ CH. 


horned Panes. They are not Satyrs: these, as will later be seen 
(p. 380), are horse demons. By the early middle of the 5th 
century B.C., the date of this red-figured vase, the worship of the 
Arcadian Pan was well-established at Athens, and the goat-men, 
the Panes, became the fashionable and fitting attendants of the 
Earth-Maiden. The inscriptions above their heads can, unfortu- 
nately, not be read. 

A vase of much later date (fig. 69) shows us substantially the 





iene ie 
OS eee 


Fic. 69. 


same scene. The design is from a red-figured krater’ in the — 
Berlin Antiquarium. The goddess again rises from an artificial : 
mound decorated with sprays of foliage. The attendant figures 
are different. A goat-legged Pan leans eagerly over the mound, 
but Dionysos himself, with his thyrsos, sits quietly waiting the 
Anodos, and with him are his real attendants, the horse-tailed 
Satyrs. In the left-hand corner a little winged Love-god plays on 
the double flutes. The rising goddess is not inscribed, and she is 


1 Berl. Cat. 2646. Mon. d. Inst. xu. tav. tv. This vase with others of the same 
type is explained by Dr Robert, Archiiologische Miihrchen, p. 196, as the rising of 
a Spring-Nymph, but the inscribed Berlin vase was not known to him, see also 
‘Delphika,’ J.H.S. xrx. 1899, p. 232. 


ke —— \ 
vI] The Anodos of the Maiden 279- 


best left unnamed. She is an Earth-goddess, but the presence of 
Dionysos makes us suspect that there is some reminiscence of 
Semele (p. 407). The presence of the Love-god points, as will be 
explained later (Chap. XII.), to the influence of Orphism. 

More curious, more instructive, but harder completely to 
explain, is the design in fig. 70, from a black-figured lekythos in 





Fie. 70. 


the Bibliotheque Nationale! at Paris. The colossal head and 
lifted hands of a woman are rising out of the earth. This time 
there is no artificial mound, the scene takes place in a temple or 
sanctuary, indicated by the two bounding columns. Two men, not 
Satyrs, are present, and this time not as idle spectators. Both are 
armed with great mallets or hammers, and one of them strikes the 
head of the rising woman. 

Some possible light is thrown on this difficult vase by the con- 
sideration of two others. First we have two designs from the 
obverse and reverse of an amphora?, shown together in fig. 71. 

1 Cat. 298. Milliet et Giraudon, Pl. xm. B, discussed by Prof. Furtwiingler, 
Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, p. 118, and Prof. Gardner, J.H.S. xx1. 1901, p. 5, and 
J. E. Harrison, ‘ Delphika,’ J.H.S. x1x. 1899, p. 232. 

2 Vasi dipinti del Museo Vivenzio designati di C. Angelini nel mpccxcvyt. 
Illustrato di G. Patroni 1900, Tay. xxrx. All the plates of this publication are 
of course reproduced from very old drawings and are quite untrustworthy as regards 
style. The vase under discussion is now lost, so that the original cannot be 
compared. Sig. Patroni thinks the drawing is authentic. I reproduce it partly 
because the subject is not wholly explicable, partly in the hope that by making 


it more widely known, I may lead to the rediscovery of the vase, which may be in 
some private collection. ~ 


280 The Making 07 « Goddess (CH. 


On the obverse to the left we have a scene fairly familiar, a 
goddess rising from the ground, watched by a youth, who holds in 
his hand some sort of implement, either a pick or a hammer. 


oe 


KKK KY KKK KKK 


Bre: 7. 








WYVVVI 


1 
XXKKM 


The meaning of the reverse design is conjectural. A man, short 
of stature and almost deformed in appearance, looks at a curious 
and problematic figure, half woman and half vase, set on a 
quadrangular basis. Before it, if the drawing be correct, is a 
spiked crown; round about, in the field, a number of rosettes. A 
design so problematic is not likely to be a forgery. Before its 
meaning is conjectured, another vase, whose interpretation is 
perfectly clear and certain, remains to be considered. Its meaning 
may serve to elucidate the others. 

The design in fig. 72 is from a red-figured amphora* of the 
finest period, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. At a first 
glance, when we see the splendid figure rising from the ground 
with outstretched arms, the man with the hammer and Hermes 
attendant, we think that we have the familiar scene of the rising 
of Kore or Ge. As such, had no inscriptions existed, the design 
would certainly have been interpreted. But, as it happens, each 
figure is carefully inscribed. To the left Zeus, next to him 
Hermes, next Epimetheus, and last, not Ge or Kore, but Pandora. 
Over Pandora, to greet her uprising, hovers a Love-god with 
a fillet in his outstretched hands. 


1 Prof. Perey Gardner, ‘A new Pandora Vase,’ J.H.S,. xxr, 1901, Plate 1. 


NT| The Anodos of the Maiden 281 


Pandora rises from the earth; she 7s the Earth, giver of all gifts. 
This is made doubly sure by another representation of her birth 
or rather her making. On the well-known Bale-cylix of the 














British Museum! Pandora, half statue half woman, has just been 
modelled by Hephaistos, and Athene is in the act of decking her. 
Pandora she certainly is, but against her is written her other name 
(A)nesidora’, ‘she who sends up gifts.’ Pandora is a form or title 
of the Karth-goddess in the Kore form, entirely humanized and 
vividly personified by mythology. 

In the light of this substantial identity of Pandora and the 
Earth-Kore, it is possible perhaps to offer an explanation of the 

1 Brit. Mus. Cat. p 4. White Athenian Vases, Plate 19. Myth. and Mon. of 


Ane. Athens, p. 450, fig. 50. 
2 The worship of Ge as Anesidora at Phlya will be later discussed, Chap. x1. 


282 ‘The Making of « Goddess Tom. 


problematic vase in fig. 71. Have we not on obverse and reverse 
a juxtaposition of the two scenes, tle Rise of Kore, the Making of 
Pandora? On this showing the short deformed man would be 
Hephaistos, and Pandora, half woman half vase, may be conceived 
as issuing from her once famous pithos. 

The contaminatio of the myths of the Making of Pandora and 
the Anodos of Kore may explain also another difficulty. In the 
making and moulding of Pandora, Hephaistos the craftsman uses 
his characteristic implement, the hammer. This hammer he also 
uses to break open the head of Zeus, in representations of the 
birth of Athene (p. 366). On vases with the Anodos of Kore 
the Satyrs or Panes carry and use sometimes an ordinary pick, 
sometimes a hammer, like the hammer of Hephaistos. The pick 
is the natural implement for breaking clods of earth, the spade 
appears to have been unknown before the iron age—the hammers 
have always presented a difficulty. May they not have arisen in 
connection with the myth of the making of Pandora, and then, by 
confusion, passed to the Anodos of Kore ? 

Finally, returning to the difficult design in fig. 70, I would 
offer another suggestion. The fact that the scene takes place in a 
sanctuary seems to me to indicate that we have here a representa- 
tion of some sort of mimetic ritual. The Anodos of Kore was, as 
has already been seen (p. 131), dramatized at certain festivals; 
exactly how we do not know. At the festival of the Charila 
(p. 107) a puppet dressed as a girl was brought out, beaten, and 
ultimately hanged in a chasm. Is it not possible that at some 
festival of the Earth-goddess there was a mimetic enactment of 
the Anodos, that the earth or some artificially-formed chasm was 
broken open by picks, and that a puppet or a real woman emerged. 
It is more likely, I think, that the vase-painter had some such 
scene in his mind than that the Satyrs with their picks or 
hammers represent the storm and lightning from heaven beating 
on the earth to subdue it and compel its fertility®» At Megara, 


1 A lost play of Sophocles was called Ilavddépa 7 Xpupoxéra. The cdipa though 
characteristic of Hephaistos the craftsman was used by agriculturists. Trygaeus in 
the Pax (v. 566) remembers that his c@ipa waits at home glittering and ready, 
see J.H.S. xx. 1900, p. 107. 

2 Prof. Furtwiingler, Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, pp. 117 and 124, ‘Ein uraltes 
mythisches Symbol fiir die Blitze sind aber Hammer und Beil. Sie sind es...die 
mit michtigen Gewittern den Kopf der grossen Mutter Erde schlagen und himmern 
bis sie erwacht und erweicht.’ 


vt] | Pedic . 283 


near the Prytaneion, Pausanias' saw ‘a rock which was called 
Anaklethra’, “Calling Up,” because Demeter, if anyone like to 
believe it, when she was wandering in search of her daughter, 
called her up there. He adds, ‘the women of Megara to this day 
perform rites that are analogous to the legend told.’ Unhappily 
he does not tell us what these rites were. Lucian devotes a half- 
serious treatise to discussing the scope and merits of pantomimic 
dancing, Xenophon* in his Banquet lets us see that educated 
guests after dinner preferred the acting of a myth to the tumbling 
of a dancing girl, but the actual ritual pantomime of the ancients 
is to us a sealed book. Of one thing we may be sure, that the 
‘things done’ (6p@eva) of ritual helped to intensify mythological 
impersonation as much as, or perhaps more than, the ‘things 
spoken’ (én) of the poet. 





PANDORA. 


To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real 
goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice 
to her. By the time of Aristophanes* she had become a misty 
figure, her ritual archaic—matter for the oracles of ‘ Bakis.’ The 
prophet instructing Peisthetairos reads from his script: 


‘First to Pandora sacrifice a white-fleeced ram.’ 


The scholiast gives the correct and canonical interpretation 
‘to Pandora, the earth, because she bestows all things necessary 
for life.’ By his time, and long before, explanation was necessary. 
Hipponax’ knew of her; Athenaeus, in his discussion of cabbages, 
quotes from memory the mysterious lines: 


‘He grovelled, worshipping the seven-leaved cabbage 
To which Pandora sacrificed a cake 
At the Thargelia for a pharmakos.’ 


The passage, though obscure, is of interest because it connects 
Pandora the Earth-goddess with the Thargelia, the festival of the 


1 P. 1, 43. 2...douxdra dé TO Abyw SpGow és Huds ere ai Meyapéwy yuvatkes. 

2 The Etymologicon Magnum has the form ’Avax\népis. 

3 Xen. Symp. vit. 5. Ihave elsewhere (Myth. and Mon. of Anc. Athens, p. exvil) 
discussed the possible influence of such mimetic presentations on the fixed mytho- 
logical types of vase-paintings. Dr Frazer (Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. 111. p. 165) 
makes the interesting suggestion that in sacred dramas may be found a possible 
meeting-ground between Euhemerists and their opponents. 

4 Ar. dv. 971, schol. ad loc. > Frg. Hippon. ap. Athen. rx. § 370. 


284 The Making of a Goddess [cH 


first-fruits of the Earth. Effaced in popular ritual she emerges in 
private superstition. Philostratos?, in his Life of Apollonius, tells 
how a certain man, in need of money to dower his daughter, 
‘sacrificed’ to Earth for treasure, and Apollonius, to whom he 
confided his desire, said, ‘Earth and I will help you,’ and he 
prayed to Pandora, sought in a garden, and found the desired 
treasure. 


Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as 
Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure 
is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, 
but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus. On a late, 
red-figured krater in the British Museum’, obviously inspired by 
Hesiod, we have the scene of her birth. She no longer rises half- 
way from the ground, but stands stiff and erect in the midst of the 
Olympians. Zeus is there seated with sceptre and thunderbolt, 
Poseidon is there, Iris and Hermes and Ares and Hera, and Athene 
about to crown the new-born maiden. Earth is all but forgotten, 
and yet so haunting is tradition that, in a lower row, beneath the 
Olympians, a chorus of men, disguised as goat-horned Panes, still 
dance their welcome. It is a singular reminiscence, and, save as 
a survival, wholly irrelevant. 

Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has 
shaped it to his own bourgeots, pessimistic ends; he tells it twice. 
Once in the Theogony’*, and here the new-born maiden has no 
name, she is just a ‘beautiful evil,’ a ‘crafty snare’ to mortals. 
But in the Works and Days* he dares to name her and yet with 
infinite skill to wrest her glory into shame: 

‘He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of Kronos, the Lord, 

For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at his word 

Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair, . 

And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess girt her and decked her hair. 

And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set 

Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her others yet, 

The Hours with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of spring, 

While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything. 


: : 
Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place, 
lg _ . . . . 

Tricks and flattering words in her bosom and thievish ways. 


1 Philostr. Vit. Apoll. xxxrx. § 275. 

* Brit. Mus. Cat. © 467, J.H.S. xt. pl. 11 and 12, p. 278, and Roscher, Lev. 
8.v. Pandora, fig. 2. 

’ Hes. Theog. 570, trans. Mr D. 8. MacColl. 

4 Hes. Op. 69 ff. 


——a my OO 
VT] Pandora 285 


He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering giving her voice, 

Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of her this was his choice, 

Panpora, because in Olympus the gods joined together then 

And all of them gave her, a gift, a sorrow, to covetous men.’ 

Through all the magic of a poet, caught and enchanted himself 
by the vision of a lovely woman, there gleams the ugly malice of 
theological animus. Zeus the Father will have no great Earth- 
goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, 
but her figure is from the beginning, so he re-makes it ; woman, who 
was the inspirer, becomes the temptress ; she who made all things, 
gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, 
dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and 
blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth 
of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest’: 


‘He spake and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed.’ 


Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matri- 
archy to patriarchy, and the shift itself, spite of a seeming 
retrogression, 1s a necessary stage in a real advancey, Matriarchy 
gave to women a false because a magical prestige. With patri- 
archy came inevitably the facing of a real fact, the fact of the 
greater natural weakness of women. Man the stronger, when 
he outgrew his belief in the magical potency of woman, pro- 
ceeded by a pardonable practical logic to despise and enslave her 
as the weaker. The future held indeed a time when the non- 
natural, mystical truth came to be apprehended, that the stronger 
had a need, real and imperative, of the weaker. Physically nature 
had from the outset compelled a certain recognition of this truth, 
but that the physical was a sacrament of the spiritual was a hard 
saying, and its understanding was not granted to the Greek, save 
here and there where a flicker of the truth gleamed and went 
through the vision of philosopher or poet. 


So the great figure of the Earth-goddess, Pandora, suffered 
eclipse: she sank to be a beautiful, curious woman ; she opened 
her great grave-pithos?, she that was Mother of Life; the Keres 
fluttered forth, bringing death and disease ;—only Hope remained. 
Strangely enough, when the great figure of the Earth-Mother 
re-emerges, she re-emerges, it will later be seen, as Aphrodite. 


1 Hes. Op. 59. 2 For the origin of the pithos see J.H.S. xx. 1900, p. 99. 
'P 


286 The Making of « Goddess [ CH. 


THE MAIDEN-TRINITIES. 


So far we have seen that a goddess, to the primitive Greek, 
took twofold form, and this twofold form, shifting and easily 
interchangeable; is seen to resolve itself very simply into the two 
stages of a woman's life, as Maiden and Mother. But Greek 
religion has besides the twofold Mother and Maiden a number of 
triple forms, Women-Trinities, which at first sight are not so 
readily explicable. We find not only three Gorgons and three 
Graiae, but three Semnae, three Moirae, three Charites, three 
Horae, three Agraulids, and, as a multiple of three, nine Muses, 

First it should be noted that the trinity-form is confined to the 
women goddesses. Greek religion had in Zeus and Apollo the 
figures of the father and the son, but of a male trinity we find no 
trace. Zeus and Apollo, incomers from the North, stand alone in 
this matter of relationship. We do not find the fatherhood of 
Poseidon emphasized, nor the sonship of Hermes ; there is no wide 
and universal development of the father and the son as there was 
of the Mother and the Maiden. Dualities and trinities alike seem 
to be characteristic of the old matriarchal goddesses. 

Evidence is not lacking that the trinity-form grew out of the 
duality. Plutarch* notes as one of the puzzling things at Delphi 
which required looking into, that two Moirae were worshipped there, 
whereas everywhere else three were canonical. It has already 
been seen (p. 242) that the number of the Semnae varied between 
two and three, and that, as three was the ultimate canonical 
number, we might fairly suppose the number two to have been 
the earlier. It is the same with the Charites. Pausanias? was 
told in Boeotia that Eteocles not only was ‘ the first who sacrificed 
to the Charites, but, further, he ‘instituted three Charites. The 
names Eteocles gave to his three Charites the Boeotians did not 
remember. ‘This is unfortunate, as Orchomenos was the most 
ancitnt seat of the worship of the Charites; their images there 
were natural stones that fell to Eteocles from heaven. Pausanias 
goes on to note that ‘among the Lacedaemonians two Charites only 
were worshipped; their names were Kleta and Phaenna. The 
Athenians also from ancient days worshipped two Charites, by 


1 Plut. de Hi ap. Delph. 1. 1. 2 Pp, x. 85,71, 


“yey The Meaden-Trinities 287 


name Auxo and Hegemone.’ Later it appears they fell in with 
the prevailing fashion, for ‘in front of the entrance to the Acropolis 
there were set up the images of three Charites, The ancient 
Charites at Orchomenos, at Sparta, at Athens, were two, and it 
may be conjectured that they took form as the Mother and the 
Maid. 

The three daughters of Cecrops! are by the time of Euripides 
‘maidens threefold’; the three daughters of Erechtheus?, who are 
but their later doubles, are a ‘triple yoke of maidens,’ and yet—in 
the case of the daughters of Cecrops—there is ample evidence? that 
originally they were two, and these two probably a mother and 
a maid. Aglauros and Pandrosos are definite personalities ; they 
had regular precincts and shrines, known in historical times, 
Aglauros on the north slope of the Acropolis*, where the maidens 
danced, Pandrosos to the west of the Erechtheion®. But of a 
shrine, precinct, or sanctuary of Herse we have no notice. Ovid® 
probably felt the difficulty ; he lodges Herse in a chamber midway 
between Aglauros and Pandrosos. The women of Athens swore by 
Aglauros and more rarely by Pandrosos’. Aglauros, by whom 
they swore most frequently, and who gave her name to the 
Agraulids, was probably the earlier and mother-form. Herse was 
no good even to swear by; she is the mere senseless etymological 
eponym of the festival of the Hersephoria, a third sister added to 
make up the canonical triad. The Hersephoria out of which she 
is made was not in her honour; it was celebrated to Athene, to 
Pandrosos, to Ge, to Themis, to Eileithyia. 

The women trinities rose out of dualities, but not every duality 
became a trinity. Plutarch®, in discussing the origin of the nine 
Muses, notes that we have not three Demeters, or three Athenes, 
or three Artemises. He touches unconsciously on the reason why 
some dualities resisted the impulse to become trinities. Where 
personification had become complete, as in the case of Demeter 
and Kore, or of their doubles, Damia and Auxesia, no third figure 
could lightly be added. Where the divine pair were still in flux, 

1 Kur. Jon 496. 2 Eur. Erech. frg. v. 3. 


3 I have collected and discussed this evidence in ‘Mythological Studies,’ J.H.S., 
vol. x11. 1891, p. 350. 


Sieg IEEE Bebe te 20.10 6 Ov. Met. 1. 759. 
7 Schol. ad Ar. Thesm. 533 xara yap THs ’Aypavdou wurvoy Kara dé THs Havdpdcou 
oT AVLOTEpoV. * 


8 Plut. Quaest. Symp. 1x. 14. 2. 


288 The Making of « Goddess [ CH. 


still called by merely adjectival titles that had not crystallized 
into proper names, a person more or less mattered little. Thus 
we have a trinity of Semnae, of Horae, of Moirae, but the Thesmo- 
phoroi, who as Thesmophoroi might have easily passed into a 
trinity, remain always, because of the clear outlines of Demeter 
and Kore, a duality. 

When we ask what was the impulse to the formation of 
trinities, the answer is necessarily complex. Many strands seem 
to have gone to their weaving. 


First, and perhaps foremost, in the ritual of the lower stratum, 
of the dead and of chthonic powers, three was, for some reason 
that escapes us,a sacred number. The dead were thrice invoked; 
sacrifice was offered to them on the third day; the mourning in 
some parts of Greece lasted three days; the court of the Areopagus, 
watched over by deities of the underworld, sat, as has been seen 
(p. 242), on three days; at the three ways the threefold Hecate of 
the underworld was worshipped. It was easy and natural that 
threefold divinities should arise to keep ward over a ritual so consti- . 
tuted. When the powers of the underworld came to preside over 
agriculture, the transition from two to three seasons would tend in 
the same direction. For two seasons a duality was enough—the 
Mother for the fertile summer, the Maid for the sterile winter—but, 
when the seasons became three, a trinity was needed, or at least 
would be welcomed. 

Last, the influence of art must not be forgotten. A central 
figure of the mother, with her one daughter, composes ill. Archaic 
art loved heraldic groupings, and for these two daughters were 
essential. Such compositions as that on the Boeotian amphora 
in fig. 60 might easily suggest a trimity® 


Once the triple form established, it is noticeable that in 
Greek mythology the three figures are always regarded as maiden 
goddesses, not as mothers. They may have taken their rise in the 


1 For three in the cultus of the dead, see Diels, Sibyllinische Blitter, p. 40. 
For a discussion of trinities other than of maiden goddesses, see Usener, ‘ Dreiheit’ 
(Rhein. Mus. uvur. pp. 1—47). 

* In this connection it may be worth noting*that where the nature of the dual 
goddess prevents her taking a central place as in the case of Hileithyia she never 
merges into a trinity. There are often two Hileithyiai, e.g. one to either side of Zeus 
at the birth of Athene, but never three. 


a 


v1] The Maiden-Trinities 289 


Mother and the Maid, but the Mother falls utterly away. The 
Charites, the Moirae, the Horae, are all essentially maidens. The 
reverse is the case in Roman religion; trinities of women god- 
desses of fertility occur frequently in very late Roman art, but 
they are Matres, Mothers. Three Mothers are rather heavy, and 
do not dance well. 

In the archaic votive relief* in fig. 73 we have the earliest sculp- 
tured representation of the 
maiden trinity extant. Had 
the relief been uninscribed, 
we should have been at a loss 
how to name the three austere 
figures. Two carry fruits, and 
one a wreath. They might 
be Charites or Eumenides, or 
merely nymphs. Most happily 
the sculptor has left no doubt. 
He has written against them 
Kopas otvas, ‘Sotias (dedi- 
cated) the Korai’ the ‘ Mai- 
dens. Sotias has massed the 
three stately figures very 
closely together ; he is rever- 
ently conscious that though 
they are three persons, yet 
they are but one goddess. He is half monotheist. 

The same origin of the maiden trinity is clearly indicated in 
the relief* in fig. 74, found during the ‘ Enneakrounos’ excava- 
tions in the precinct of Dionysos, at Athens. The main field of 
the relief is occupied by two figures of Panes, with attendant 
goats; between them an altar. The Panes are twofold, not 
because they are father and son, but because there were two caves 
of Pan, and the god is thought of as dwelling in each. After the 
battle of Marathon the worship of Pan was established in the 
ancient dancing-ground of the Agraulids ; by the time of Euripides¢, 
Pan is thought of as host and they as guests : 





Fic. 73. 


1 Roscher, Lex. s.v. Matres, Matronae. 

2 Fréhner, Coll. Tyszkicwisk, Pl. xvi.; J.H.S. x1x. p. 218, Fig. 3. 
3 A. Mitt. 1896, p. 266, Taf. vit. 

4 Kur. Jon 490, trans. Mr D. 8. MacColl. 


H. 19 


— 


290 The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


‘O seats of Pan and rock hard by 

To where the hollow Long Rocks lie, 

Where before Pallas’ temple-bound 

Agraulos’ daughters three go round 

Upon their grassy dancing-ground 
To nimble reedy staves, 

When thou, O Pan, art piping found 
Within thy shepherd caves.’ 


But Pan was a new-comer; the Agraulids were there from the 
beginning, as early as Cecrops, their snake-tailed father. Busy 





Fie. 74. 


though he is with Pan, the new-comer, the artist cannot, 
may not forget the triple maidens. He figures them in the upper 
frieze, and in quaint fashion he hints that though three they are 
one. In the left-hand corner he sets the image of a threefold 
goddess, a Hecate’. 

But, as time went on, the fact that the three were one is more 


1 For the development of the type of Hecate in conjunction with the Charites, 
see Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 373. 


vI| The Maiden-Trinities 291 


and more forgotten. They become three single maidens, led by 
Hermes in the dance; by Hermes Charidotes, whose worship as 
the young male god of fertility, of flocks and herds, was so closely 
allied to that of the Charites. 

There is no more frequent type of votive relief! than that of 
which an instance is given in fig. 75. The cave of Pan is the 


CURA | 
Mt [ i i fi LL crt aT 
i oo pena Nel : 
bi 7 ee Nin 








Hig. 75. 


scene, Pan himself is piping, and the three maidens, led by Hermes, 
dance. The cave, the artist knows, belonged in his days to Pan, 
but the ancient dwellers there, the Maidens, still bulk the largest. 
As a rule the reliefs are not inscribed, sometimes there is a dedica- 
tion ‘to the Nymphs. The personality of the Agraulids has 
become shadowy, they are merely Maidens or Brides. 

The ancient threefold goddesses, as all-powerful Charites, 
paled before the Olympians, faded away into mere dancing 
attendant maidens; but sometimes, in the myths told of these very 
Olympians, it is possible to trace the reflection of the older 
potencies. A very curious instance is to be found in the familiar 


1 Tn the Vienna Museum, found at Gallipoli, Arch. Epigr. Mitt. vol. 1. Taf. 1. 
Prof. O. Benndorf, ‘Die Chariten des Sokrates,’ Arch. Zeit. 1869. 


19—2 


_—— “oe 


292 The Making of a Goddess 





[ CH. 


story! of the ‘Judgment of Paris, a story whose development 
and decay are so instructive that it must be examined in some 


detail. 


THE ‘JUDGMENT OF PARIS.’ 


The myth in its current form is sufficiently patriarchal to 
please the taste of Olympian Zeus himself, trivial and even vulgar 
enough to make material for an ancient Satyr-play or a modern 
opera-bouffe. 

‘Goddesses three to Ida came 
Immortal strife to settle there— 
Which was the fairest of the three, 
And which the prize of beauty should wear.’ 

The bone of contention is a golden apple thrown by Eris at the 
marriage of Peleus and Thetis among the assembled gods. On it 
was written, ‘Let the fair one take it, or, according to some 





Fic. 76. 


authorities, ‘The apple for the fair one*®’ The three high god- 
desses betake them for judgment to the king’s son, the shepherd 
Paris. The kernel of the myth is, according to this version, a 
Kad\oTetov, a beauty-contest. 


1 The sources for the story are well collected in Roscher’s Lexicon, s.v. Paris, 
a the “eae of the article seems to have no suspicion of the real substratum of 
the myth. 

* Lue. dial. deor. 20 } kad} AaBérw. Tzetzes ad Lycophr. 93 r7 Kadp 70 wArov. 


vI] The ‘Judgment of Paris’ 293 


On one ancient vase, and on one only of all the dozens that 
remain, is the Judgment so figured. The design in fig. 76 is 
from a late red-figured krater in the Bibliotheque Nationale’. 
Paris, dressed as a Phrygian, is seated in the centre. Hermes is 
telling of his mission. Grouped around, the three goddesses 
prepare for the beauty-contest in characteristic fashion. Hera 
needs no aid, she orders her veil and gazes well satisfied in a 
mirror; Aphrodite stretches out a lovely arm, and a Love-God 
fastens ‘a bracelet of gold on her flesh’; and Athene, watched only 
by the great grave dog, goes to a little fountain shrine and, clean- 
hearted goddess as she is, lays aside her shield, tucks her gown 
about her, and has—a good wash. Our hearts are with Oenone 
when she cries: 

HO) Paris, 
Give it to Pallas!” but he heard me not, 
Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me !’ 

It is noteworthy that even in this representation, obviously of a 
beauty-contest, the apple is absent. 

It is quite true that now and again one of the goddesses holds 
in her hand a fruit. An instance is given in the charming design 
in fig. 77, from a red-figured stamnos in the British Museum’, 









ea g i 


Fruit and flowers are held indifferently by one or all of the 
goddesses, and the reason will presently become clear. In the 
present case Hera holds a fruit, in fig. 81 the two last goddesses 
hold each a fruit. In fig. 77, against both Aphrodite and Hera, 
is inscribed Kany, ‘ Beautiful,’ and before the blinding beauty of 
the goddesses Paris veils his face. The inscription Xapyidns 


1 Cat. 422. Milliet et Giraudon, Pl. 104. 
2 B. M. Cat. & 289. J.H.S. vit. 1886, p. 9. 


294 The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


enables us to date the vase as belonging to the first half of the 
5th cent. B.C. 

Turning to black-figured vases, a good instance is given in 
fig. 78 from a patera’ in the Museo Greco-Etrusco at Florence. 





Fie. 78. 


The three goddesses, bearing no apple and no attributes, the 
centre one only distinguished by the spots upon her cloak, follow 
Hermes into the presence of Paris. Paris starts away in manifest 


alarm. In the curious design 


f= 


in fig. 79, Hermes actually seizes 
Paris by the wrist to compel his attendance. There is here clearly 
no question of voluptuous delight at the beauty of the goddesses. 
The three maiden figures are scrupulously alike; each carries 
a wreath. Discrimination would be a hard task. The figures are 
placed closely together, as in the representation of the Maidens in 
fig. 73. 

1 J.H.S. vu. 1888, p. 198, fig. 1. 

* J.H.S. vu. 1888, p. 2038. 


v1] The ‘Judgment of Paris’ 295 


Finally, in fig. 80, a design from a black-figured amphora’, 
we have the type most frequent of all; Hermes leads the three 





Fie. 79. 


goddesses, but in the Judgment of Paris no figure of Paris 1s 
present. Without exaggeration it may be said that in three out 
of four representations of the ‘Judgment’ in black-figured vase- 
paintings the protagonist is absent. The scene takes the form of 
a simple procession, Hermes leading the three goddesses. 

This curious fact has escaped the attention of no archaeologist 
who has examined the art types of the ‘Judgment.’ It has been 
variously explained. At a time when vase-paintings were sup- 
posed to have had literary sources, it was usual to attempt a 
literary explanation. Attention was called to the fact that 
Proklos?, in his excerpts of the Kypria, noted that the goddesses, 
‘by command of Zeus were led to Ida by Hermes’; of this leading 
it was then supposed that the vase-paintings were ‘illustrations.’ 

1 J.H.S. vi. 1888, p. 282. 

2 Procl. Excerpt. at mpos ’AdéEavdpov év “ldn kata Avds rpoorayny bp’ “Epuot pos 


riv Kplow dyovrat, See Schneider, Der troische Sagenkreis, p. 99, and Welcker, Ep. 
Kyklos 11. 88. 


* 


296 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


Such methods of interpretation are now discredited ; no one sup- 
poses that the illiterate vase-painter worked with the text of the 
Kypria before him, Art had its own traditions. 

Another explanation, scarcely more happy, has been attempted. 
‘Archaic art, we are told, ‘loved processions.’ Archaic art, concerned 





















































































































































































































































































































































































































































to fill the space of a circular frieze surrounding a vase, did indeed 
‘love processions, but not with a passion so fond and unreasonable, 
and it loved something else better, the lucid telling of a story. In 
depicting other myths, archaic art is not driven to express a story 
in the terms of an inappropriate procession ; it is indeed largely 
governed by traditional form, but not to the extent of tolerating 
needless obscurity. The ‘Judgment’ is a situation essentially 
stationary, with Paris for centre; Hermes is subordinate. 

’ We are so used to the procession form that it requires a certain 
effort of the imagination to conceive of the myth embodied otherwise. 
But, if we shake ourselves loose of preconceived notions, surely the 
natural lucid way of depicting the myth would be something after 
this fashion: Paris in the centre, facing the successful Aphrodite, 


VI] The ‘Judgment of Paris’ 297 


to whom he speaks or hands the apple or a crown; behind him, to 
indicate neglect, the two defeated goddesses ; Hermes anywhere, to 
indicate the mandate of the gods. Such a form does indeed appear 
later, when the vase-painter thought for himself and shook himself 
free of the dominant tradition. The procession form, .as we have 
it, was not made for the myth, it was merely adapted and taken 
over, and instantly the suggestion occurs, ‘ Did not the myth itself 
in some sense rise out of the already existing art form, an art 
form in which Paris had no place, in which the golden apple was 
not?’ That form was. the ancient type of Hermes leading the 
three Korai or Charites. In the design in fig. 80, the centre 
figure Athene is differentiated by her tall helmet and her aegis. 
Athene is the first of the goddesses to be differentiated—and why ? 
She was not victorious, but the vase-painter is an Athenian, and 
he is concerned for the glory of 1) ’A@nvaia Kopn, the Maiden of 
Athens. 

In the design in fig. 81, from a black-figured. amphora in the 
Berlin Museum’, the three goddesses are all alike: the first holds 


4 

4 
{i 
ly 
Y 
lf 
Y 
lV 


—_— 
oss 





a flower, the two last fruits, all fitting emblems of the Charites. 
Hermes, their leader, carries a huge irrelevant sheep—irrelevant for 
the herald of the gods on his way to Ida, significant for the 
leader of the Charites, the god of the increase of flocks and herds. 
Does the picture represent a ‘Judgment, or Hermes and the 
Charites 2 Who knows? The doubt is here, as often, more instruc- 
tive than certainty. 


1 Berl. Cat. 2154. Endt, Beitriige zur Ionischen Vasenmalerei, p. 29, figs. 11, » 
12 and 13, 


298 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


From vases alone it would be sufficiently evident, I think, 
that the ‘Judgment of Paris”’ is really based on Hermes and 
the Charites, but literary evidence confirms the view. The 
Kpiovs, the Decision, of Paris is always as much a Choice as a 
Judgment; a Choice somewhat like that invented for Heracles by 
the philosopher Prodicus, though at once more spontaneous and 
more subtle than that rather obvious effort at edification. The 
particular decision is associated in legend with the name of a 
special hero, of one particular ‘young man moving to and fro 
alone, in an empty hut in the firelight®’ It is an anguish of 
hesitancy ending in a choice which precipitates the greatest 
tragedy of Greek legend. But before Paris was there the Choice 
was there. The exact elements of the Choice vary in different 
versions. Athene is sometimes Wisdom and sometimes War. 
But in general Hera is Royalty or Grandeur; Athene is Prowess ; 
Aphrodite of course is Love. And what exactly has the ‘young 
man’ to decide? Which of the three is fairest? Or whose gifts 
he desires the most? It matters not at all, for both are different 
ways of saying the same thing. Late writers, Alexandrian and 
Roman, degrade the story into a beauty-contest between three 
thoroughly personal goddesses, vulgar in itself and complicated by 
bribery still more vulgar. But early versions scarcely distinguish 
the goddesses from the gifts they brmg. There is no difference be- 
tween them except the difference of their gifts. They are Charites, 
Gift-bringers. They are their own gifts. Or, as the Greek put 
it, their gifts are their onpeta, their tokens. And Hermes had 
led them long since, in varying forms, before the eyes of each and 
all of mankind. They might be conceived as undifferentiated, as 
mere Givers-of-Blessing in general. But it needed only a little 
reflection to see that Xapus often wars against Xapcs, and that if 
one be chosen, others must be rejected’. 


As gift-givers the same three goddesses again appear in the 


1 The figure of Paris which does not here concern us came in with the popu- 
larity of the Homeric cycle, and the connection between the conflict of onueta and 
the Trojan war may probably have been due to the author of the Aypria. 

2 Kur, Andr. 281. 

3 Since the above was written I see that Eustathius (§ 1665. 59) expressly states 
that Aphrodite strove with the Charites: 0a éploat wept KddXous Thy Te “Appodlrny kat 
ras Xdpiras als dvéuara Iacbén, Kady cal Hidpoo’vy, rov 5é dixdoavra xpivat Kah 
Thy Kadhv, jv Kal yiwac tov “Hpaocrov. He goes on to say that Kalé married 
Arachnos in Crete and that Arachnos mryévra adxety rp Adpodiry mcyivat. 


VI] The ‘Judgment of Paris’ 299 


myth of the daughters of Pandareos, but this time they are not 
rivals; and with them comes a fourth, Artemis, whose presence is 
significant. Homer tells the story by the mouth of Penelope’: 


‘Their father and their mother dear died by the gods’ high doom, 
The maidens were left ophans alone within their home ; 

Fair Aphrodite gave them curds and honey of the bee 

And lovely wine, and Hera made them very fair to see, 

And wise beyond all women-folk. And holy Artemis 

Made them to wax in stature, and Athene for their bliss 
Taught them all glorious handiworks of woman’s artifice.’ 


The maiden goddesses tend the maidens, but to Homer the 
Maiden above all others is Artemis, sister of Apollo, daughter of 





Fic. 82. 


Zeus?. He puts the story into the mouth of Penelope as part of a 
prayer to Artemis. 


1 Hom. Od. xx. 67. ‘ Spo 

2 I follow Prof. Ridgeway (J.H.S. 1898, p. xxxiv) in holding that Artemis with 
her father Zeus and her brother Apollo are immigrants from the North, divinities of 
the Achaean stock. Hence their dominance in Homer. 


300 The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


It is curious and significant that the early vase-painter,in dealing 
with the story of the daughters of Pandareos, knows of three goddesses 
only. The design in fig. 82 is from the lid of a pyxis, of early 
black-figured style, in a private collection at Athens’, The vase- 
painter is concerned mainly with the story of the theft of the great 
golden dog of Crete. He makes the dog of supernatural size, with 
a splendid high-curled tail. Pandareos has stolen it, and the theft 
has been discovered by Hermes, who comes hurriedly up to seize 
the prize. Pandareos’ is just making off in eager haste. His two 
daughters, quaintly enveloped in one cloak to show their close 
relationship, stand by. Behind Hermes, with his huge kerykeion, 
come in familiar procession the three ancient maidens—Aphrodite 
with a wreath, her hair arrayed in a quaint twisted pigtail; Hera 
with a ram-headed sceptre; Athene with a helmet nearly as big as 
herself. The goddesses have come a little proleptically ; Pandareos 
is still there, the maidens are not yet ‘alone within their home,’ 
but the vase-painter wants to tell all he knows, and, not being 
inspired by Homer, he is faithful to the old three goddesses. 
Artemis is—nowhere’®, 

But, owing to the influence of Homer and the civilization he 
represented, the figure of Artemis waxes more and more dominant, 
and this especially by contrast with the Kore of the lower stratum, 
Aphrodite. In the Hippolytus of Euripides they are set face to 
face in their eternal enmity. The conflict is for the poet an issue 
of two moral ideals, but the human drama is played out against 
the shadowy background of an ancient racial theomachy, the 
passion of the South against the cold purity of the North. 

Belonging as she does to this later Northern stratum, the 
figure of Artemis lies properly outside our province, but to one of 
the ancient maiden trinity, to Athene, she lent much of her cold, 
clean strength. An epigram* to her honour in the Anthology is 


1 Published and discussed by M. P. Perdrizet, Bull. de Corr. Hell. 1898, p. 584. 

° Tradition variously ascribed the theft to Tantalos and Pandareos. Here the 
presence of the two daughters points to Pandareos as the offender, The sources for 
the myth of the theft in its various forms, which do not here immediately concern 
us, are collected in Roscher’s Lexicon, s.v. Pandareus, see also p. 226. 

% On only one vase representing the ‘ Judgment’ does Artemis so far as I know 
appear, viz. the very late amphora in the Naples Museum. (Heydemann, Cat. 
2870.) 

4 Anthol, Palat. v1. 280; the play on xépa in the lines 

Tas Te Képas, Atuvare Kdpa, Képa, ws émvekés 
divOero Kal ra Kopav évdvmar’ ’Apréucde 
cannot be rendered in English. 


we 


vi] Athene 301 


worth noting, because it shows, clearly and beautifully, how the 
maidenhood of the worshipper mirrors itself in the worship of 
a maiden, whether of the South or of the North: 


‘Maid of the Mere, Timareté here brings, 
Before she weds, her cymbals, her dear ball 
To thee a Maid, her maiden offerings, 
Her snood, her maiden dolls, their clothes and all, 
Hold, Leto’s Child, above Timareté 
Thine hand, and keep her virginal like thee.’ 


It would be a lengthy though in some respects a profitable 
task to take each maiden form that the great matriarchal goddess 
assumed and examine it in turn, to enquire into the rise and 
development of each local Kore, of Dictynna, of Aphaia, of Callisto, 
of Hecate, of Bendis and the like. Instead it will be necessary to 
confine ourselves to the three great dominant Korai of the ‘Judg- 
ment, Hera, Athene and Aphrodite. 


ATHENE. 


The doubt has probably long lurked in the reader’s mind, 
whether two of the three, Hera and Aphrodite, have any claim to 
the title maiden. Happily in the case of Athene no such difficulty 
arises. She is the Parthenos, the maiden; her temple is the 
maiden-chamber, the Parthenon ; natural motherhood she stead- 
fastly refuses, she is the foster-mother of heroes after the old 
matriarchal fashion ; Ge, the real mother, bears Erichthonios, and 
Athene nurtures him to manhood; she bears the like relationship 
to Herakles, she is the maiden of Herakles ((Hpaxdéous copy’). 

Moreover it has been frequently observed that the early form 
of her name Athenaia is purely adjectival’, she is the Athenian 
one, the Athenian Maid, Pallas, our Lady of Athens. Plato*® in 
the Laws sees clearly that Athenaia is but the local Kore, the 
incarnation of Athens, though, after the fashion of his day, he 
inverts cause and effect ; he makes the worshipper in the image of 
the worshipped. Speaking of the armed Athene, he says, ‘and 
methinks our Kore and Mistress who dwells among us, joying her 

1 Dilthey, Arch. Zeit. 1873. 

2 Pauly-Wissowa s.v. Athena, p- 1941, 50. 


= Plat. Legg. 796 7 de av tov Tap’ juiv Képn Kal déomrowa...a 67) TavTws pmetr bas 
apémov ay en Képous Te Gua Kal Kdpas. 


— =. 


302. The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


in the sport of dancing, was not minded to play with empty hands, 
but adorned her with her panoply, and thus accomplished her 
dance, and it is fitting that in this our youths and our maidens 
should imitate her.2. It was she who imitated her youths and 
maidens, she who was the very incarnation of their life and being, 
dancing in armour as they danced, fighting when they fought, 
born of her father’s head when they were reborn as the children of 
Reason and Light. 

Athene’s other name, Pallas, tells the same tale. If Athene is 
the Kore of the local clan of the Athenians, Pallas is the Kore of 
the clan of the Pallantidae, the foes of Athenian Theseus; later 
their male eponym was Pallas’: 


‘Pallas had for lot 
The southern land, rough Pallas, he who rears 
A brood of giants.’ 

The very name Pallas means, it would seem, like Kore, the 
maiden. Snidas in defining the word says, ‘a great maiden, and 
it is an epithet of Athene. More expressly Strabo’, in discussing 
the cults of Egyptian Thebes, says, ‘To Zeus, whom they worship 
above all other divinities, a maiden of peculiar beauty and illus- 
trious family is dedicated; such maidens the Greeks call Pallades.’ 
This local Pallas had for her dominion the ancient court of the 
Palladium ; her image as Pallas, not as Athene, was carried in pro- 
cession by the epheboi®; but with the subjection of her clan her 
figure waned, effaced by that of Athenaia. Pallas became a mere 
adjectival praenomen to Athene,as Phoebus to Apollo. It may be 
conjectured that this ancient image of Pallas was resident on the 
Areopagos, home of the ancient Semnae, a place probably of sacred 
association to a local clan long before the dominance of the 
Acropolis; it is by her name of Pallas that the Semnae* hail the 
goddess : 

‘I welcome Pallas’ fellowship.’ 

In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though 
unconsciously, true to fact. 

1 Soph. frg. ap. Strabo § 392. That Pallas was the eponymous hero of the 
Pallantidae was first pointed out by Diincker, Hist. of Greece, vol. 1. p. 1138. 

2 Strab. xvi. 46 § 816 mapOévos iepdrac ds Kadofow ol “ENAnves maddddas: 
see A. Fick, Indogerm. Beitriige 1896. 

8 O.0.A, 1. 470. 10 cuvettyayov dé (ol &fpnBor) Iladddda wera Trav yevynrady Kal 


madw elonyayov mera mdons evKooulas. 
4 Aesch. Hum, 916, 


v1] — Athene 303 


To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the 
history of the city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they 
can be severed, its political rather than its religious developement. 
At first the maiden of the elder stratum, she has to contend for 
supremacy with a god of that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the 
late Mr R. A. Neil* has shown, was the god of the ancient aristocracy 
of Athens, an aristocracy based, as they claimed descent from 
Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The rising democracy not 
unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore, but in reviving 
her they strangely altered her being and reft from her much of 
her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither 
man nor woman; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos 
of Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she 
remains manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in 
fact, the Tyche, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of. the 
worship of the citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, 
‘immortal mistress of a band of lovers”’: 

‘The grace of the town that hath on it for crown 
But a head-band to wear 
Of violets one-hued with her hair, 


For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair 
And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births they bear,’ 


a city, 
‘Based on a crystalline sea 
Of thought and its eternity.’ 
Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct 
from Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from 
the brain of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour: 


‘Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father’s head,’ 


but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth- 
born Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn* 
writer surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressive- 
ness, yet it never impresses; the goddess is manifestly to him 
Reason, Light and Liberty; she is born at the rising of the Sun : 


‘Hyperion’s bright son stayed 
His galloping steeds for a space.’ 


1 The Knights of Aristophanes, p. 83. 
2 See Mr Gilbert Murray, Ancient Greek Literature, p. 178. 
3 Hom. Hymn. xxvut., translated by Mr D. 8. MacColl. 


———) = 


304 The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


' The event is of cosmic import: 


‘High Olympus reeled 
At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side 
Rang with a terrible cry, and the Deep was disquieted 
With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide 
Suddenly. 

Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ‘the Councillor Zeus 
is glad,’ but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, 
theatrical show, and through it all we feel and resent the theo- 
logical intent. We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets 
the Earth from which she sprang; always from the lips of the Lost 


Leader we hear the shameful denial’: 


‘There is no mother bore me for her child, 

I praise the Man in all things (save for marriage), 

Whole-hearted am I, strongly for the Father.’ 

Politics and literature turned the local Kore of Athens into 

a non-human, unreal abstraction. It is pleasant to find that the 
_ art of the simple conservative vase-painter remembered humbler 
beginnings. The design in fig. 83 is from a Corinthian alabastron 
in the Museum at Breslau*. In the 
centre of the design, Herakles is en- 
gaged in slaying a Hydra with an un- 
usually large number of heads. [olaos 
comes up from the right to engage 
some of the heads, the charioteer of 





Tolaos, Lapythos, waits in the chariot. 





Throughout the design all the figures are carefully and legibly 

inscribed in early Corinthian letters, dating about the begining 

of the 6th century B.c. ‘Athena, the Maiden of Herakles, has 

also come up (to the left) in her chariot to help her hero. Just 

behind her, perched on the goad, is a woman-headed bird. Had 
1 Aesch. Hum. 736. 


2 Rossbach, Griechische Antiken des arch. Museums in Breslau, Festgruss 40 d. 
Philologen (Gorlitz, 1889), Taf. 1. 


vi] : Athene 305 


there been no inscription we should at once have named it a 
‘decorative Siren,’ but against the woman-headed bird is clearly 
written Fods. At first sight the inscription does not seem to help 
much, but happily the lexicographers enable us to explain the 
word’. The Etymologicon Magnum tells us that by ravyyes 
are meant ai@vat, and that another form of the word was Bodyyes. 
Hesychius merely states that the w@v€ is ‘a kind of bird, and refers 
us to Aristotle* ‘On Animals.’ Our text of Aristotle gives the form 
gavé. It seems clear that the Fods of the Corinthian vase is 
a variant form of a name given to the Diver-bird. 

The inscriptions prove the vase to be Corinthian, and Corinth 
is not far remote from Megara. Pausanias’, in discussing the 
genealogies of Athenian kings, tells us that Pandion fled to 
Megara. There he fell sick and died, and by the sea in the 
territory of Megara is his tomb, on a cliff which is called the cliff 
of Athene Aithuia, ie. Athene the Diver-bird. Bird myths 
haunt the family of Pandion: Procne, Philomela, Itys and Tereus* 
all turn into birds, and Tereus, the hoopoe, had a regular cult at 
his grave. There, they say, the hoopoe first appeared, and the 
story looks like a reminiscence of a bird soul seen haunting a 
grave. Lycophron knows of a maiden goddess, a Diver-bird; he 
makes Cassandra in her prophetic madness foresee the outrage of 
Ajax and her own empty prayers’: 


‘In vain shall I invoke the Diver-Maid.’ 


Returning, with this evidence in our minds, to the woman- 
headed bird in fig. 83, the conclusion seems inevitable that we 
have in her an early local form of Athene. The vase-painter had 
advanced to an anthropomorphic conception of the goddess, so he 
draws her in full human form as Athene, but he is haunted by 
the remembrance of the Megarian Diver, Aithuia, so he adds her 
figure, half as the double of Athene (hence the parallelism of 
attitude), half as attendant, and calls her Fods. Athene on the 


1 The meaning of the woman-headed bird and of her name was first seen by 
Dr Max Mayer, ‘ Mythhistorica,’ Hermes xxxvu. 

2 Ar. Hist. Anim. rx. 18, p. 6174 9. 

3 P. 1 5. 3 and 1. 41. 6; see Dr Frazer ad loc. 25P, 143.9. 

5 Lye. Ale. 359. In connection with Lycophron’s account it is curious to find 
that in the earliest known representation of the rape of Cassandra in vase- 
paintings (J.H.S. 1884, Pl. xu.) behind the figure of Athene stands a large human- 
headed bird, but this may be a mere coincidence. 


H. 20 


ee Se 
306 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


Acropolis had another attendant bird, the little owl that still at 
evening haunts the sacred hill and hoots among the ruins of the 
Parthenon. Whatever bird was locally abundant and remarkable 
would naturally attach itself to the goddess, and be at first her 
vehicle and later her attribute: at seaside Megara the diver, at 
Athens the owl. The vase-painter remembers Athens as well as 
Megara, and adds for completeness a little owl. 

The design in fig. 84 is from a black-figured lekythos in a 
private collection in Sicily’. The scene represents Cassandra 


Hy) 





flying from Ajax and taking refuge at the xoanon of Athene. To 
the left stands old King Priam, in helpless anguish. The notable 
point about the scene is that Athene, who, statue though she be, is 
apparently about to move to the rescue, has sent as her advance 
guard her sacred animal, a great snake. The snake is clearly 
regarded as the vehicle of the wrath of the goddess. Just such 
a snake did Chryse, another local Kore, send out against the 
intruder Philoctetes*, and the snake of Chryse, Sophocles ex- 
pressly tells us, was the secret guardian of the open-air shrine. 
This ‘house-guarding snake,’ we may conjecture, was the earliest 
form of every earth-born Kore. At Athens, in the chryselephantine 
statue of Pheidias, it crouched beneath the shield, and tradition 
said it was the earth-born hero Erichthonios, fostered by the god- 
dess. But almost certainly this guardian snake was primarily the 


1 O. Benndorf, Griechische und Sicilische Vasenbilder, pl. 51. 1. 
2 Soph. Phil, 1327. 


VI] Athene 307 


guardian genius and fate of the city, before that genius or fate 
emerged to the status of godhead. When the Persians besieged 
the citadel, Herodotus’ says, the guardian snake left the honey 
cake that was its monthly sacrificial food untouched, and, ‘ when 
the priestess told this, the Athenians the more readily and eagerly 
forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had 
abandoned the citadel,’ 

The design in fig. 85 is from a late red-figured lekythos in 
the National Museum at Athens. The scene represented is a 





, s 





reminiscence of the Judgment of Paris, but one goddess only is 
present, Athene, and by her side, equal in height and majesty, 
a great snake. The artist seems dimly conscious that the snake 
is somehow the double of Athene®. To the left is the figure of a 
woman, probably Helen; she seems to be imploring the little 
xoanon of Athene to be gracious. Eros is apparently drawing 
the attention of Paris away from Athene to Helen. 

Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely shed 
her animal form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake 
and bird to attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase- 
paintings she still appears with wings. On the obverse of the 


1 Herod. vii. 41. 

2 Collignon et Couve, Cat. 1942. Jahrbuch d. Inst., Anzeiger, 1896, p. 36. 

3 Since the above was written I learn that Mr Evans has discovered at Cnossos 
the figure of a goddess with a snake in either hand and a snake or snakes coiled 
about her head. She may prove to be the prototype of Athene, of the Erinys and 
of many another form of Earth-goddess. 


20—2 


308 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


black-figured cup? in fig. 86 the artist gives her wings: but for her 
helmet we might have called her an Erinys. In the Humenides 








Fic. 86. 


of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene is specially concerned to 
slough off all traces of primitive origin, she lays suspicious 
emphasis on the fact that she can fly without wings*: 

‘With foot unwearied haste I without wings, 

Whirred onward by my aegis’ swelling sail.’ 
On the reverse of the vase she is wingless: the artist has no clear 
conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art 
type of a divinity might remain in flux. 


APHRODITE. 


The next of the three ‘ Maidens’ to be considered is Aphrodite. 
A doubt perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore 
she is in her eternal radiant youth: Kore as virgin she is not. She 
1 Coll. Faina. Rim. Mitt. 1897, x11. pl. 12. Another instance of a winged 
Athene occurs on the fine vase published by Mr A. de Ridder, Cat. Bibl. Nat. 
No. 269, p. 173, fig. 23. Athene flies over the sea carrying the dead body of a hero. 


Here she performs the office of Kos or of a Death-Siren or Harpy. 
* Aesch. Hum. 407, 


VI] Aphrodite 309 


is rather Vymphe the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order ; 
she is never wife, never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. 
In the lovely Homeric hymn it is clear that her will is for love, not 
marriage. Admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, an attempt 
foolish and futile is made to attach her to one husband, the 
craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her other name 
as his bride is Charis. She is the Charis of physical beauty 
incarnate. 

In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, 
barely tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like 
the other alien, Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. 
Her Homeric titles, Kypris and Kythereia, show that originally 
and locally she is goddess of the island South, never really at 
home in the cold austere North, where Artemis loved to dwell. 
She has about her too much of the physical joy of life ever to find 
an abiding home far from the sunshine. 

Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is 
in Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human 
passion. The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they 
tend to be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the 
influence of literature conjointly bring together a number of local 
divinities, perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide func- 
tions and attributes, ie. become departmental. Poseidon, who 
locally was Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one 
element; Hermes, who at home had dominion over flocks and 
herds and all life and growth, becomes merely a herald. 

Some such process of narrowing of functions has, we may 
suspect, gone on in the shaping of the figure of Aphrodite. It 
would be rash to assert that she was primarily an earth-goddess, 
but certain traits in her cult and character show clearly that she 
had analogies with the ‘Lady of the Wild Things.’ Fertile 
animals belong to her, especially the dove and the goat, the dove 
probably from very early days. In the Mycenaean shrine recently 
discovered by Mr Arthur Evans, one of the figures of goddesses, a 
quaint early figure with cylindrical body and upraised hands, bears 
on her head a dove. Such a figure, dating more than a thousand 
years B.C. may be the prototype of Aphrodite. About the 
cylindrical bodies of other similar figures snakes are coiled, as 


1 Tl, xv. 382. 


a2 os 


310 The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


though to mark an earth-goddess. In those early days differentia- 
tion was not sharply marked, and as yet we dare not give to these 
early divinities Olympian names. 

At Pompeii the excavations have recently brought to light the 
charming relief in fig. 871, a relief which from its style must date 


& 
; 





about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.c. A goddess is 
seated Demeter-like upon the ground, and holds her sceptre as 
Queen. Worshippers approach, man and wife and children. The 
offerings they bring, a sheep and a dove, mark the goddess as 
Aphrodite. 


The myth of her birth from the sea—a myth which probably 
took its rise in part from a popular and dubious etymology— 
seems, at first sight, to sever Aphrodite wholly from the company 
of the earth-born Korai. And yet, even here, when we come to 
examine the art-forms of the myth, it is at once manifest that the 
Sea-birth is but the Anodos adopted and adapted. 

The design in fig. 88 is from a red-figured hydria? now in the 
museum of the Municipio at Genoa. It dates about the middle 
of the 5th century B.C. and is, so far as I know, the only instance 
of the birth of Aphrodite in a vase-painting. In the centre of the 


' From a photograph. The slab is now in the Museum at Naples. 
* K. Petersen, Rim. Mittheil. 1899, pl. vir. p. 154. 


VI] Aphrodite 311 


picture a goddess, clad only in a chiton, rises up from below, 
but whether from sea or land the vase-painter is apparently not 
concerned to express. Had he wished to utter his meaning 





Fic. 88. 


more precisely nothing would have been easier than to represent 
the sea by the curved lines that in his day were the con- 
ventional indication of waves. But he is silent and I think 
significantly. The goddess on the vase-painting is received by a 
slender winged Eros; she uplifts her hands to take the taenia 
with which he greets her. Eros is here grown to young manhood 
and his presence at once makes us think of Aphrodite; but we 
are bound to remember that on the Ashmolean amphora already 
discussed (fig. 72) it is the Anodos of Pandora, not of Aphrodite, 
that is greeted by the Love-god with a taenia. Moreover, it must 
also be remembered that on the Berlin krater (fig. 69) a Love-god 
greets the rising of an Earth-goddess, be she Ge or Kore or 
Semele1. 

So far then all that can safely be said is that on the Genoa 


1 Some further instances of the rising of an Earth-goddess greeted by Hrotes 
will be discussed in Chapter x11., and see p. 570. 


312 The Making of a Goddess [ CH. 


hydria we have the Anodos of a goddess greeted by Eros. But to 
the right of the picture, behind the rising goddess, stands another 
figure, a woman, and she holds out a piece of drapery with which 
she is about to clothe the rising goddess. This is a new element 
in the Anodos type and it is this element that inclines me, with 
certain reservations and qualifications, to call the goddess Aphrodite, 
though I am by no means sure that the vase-painter conceives her 
as rising from the sea. 

On two occasions, according to ancient tradition, Aphrodite is 
received and decked by her women attendants, be they Charites 
or Horae, on her Birth from the Sea and after her sacred Bath in 
Paphos. Of the Bath we hear in the lay of Demodocus.. He 
tells how after the joy and terror of her marriage with Ares she 
uprose 


‘And fast away fled she, 
Aphrodite, lover-of-laughter, to Cyprus over the sea, 
To the pleasant shores of Paphos and the incensed altar-stone, 
Where the Graces washed her body, and shed sweet balm thereon, 
Ambrosial balm that shineth on the Gods that wax not old, 
And wrapped her in lovely raiment, a wonder to behold.’ 


Of the bedecking at the Birth we learn in a Homeric Hymn’: 
‘For the West Wind breathed to Cyprus and lifted her tenderly 


And bore her down the billow and the stream of the sounding sea 

In a cup of delicate foam. And the Hours in wreaths of gold 

Uprose in joy as she came, and laid on her fold on fold 

Fragrant raiment immortal, and a crown on the deathless head.’ 

The twoveyents, the ritual Bath,and the Sea-birth, are not 
I think clearly distinguished, and both have somehow their 
counterpart in the making and decking of Pandora. The ritual 
bath® Aphrodite shared with the two other Korai, Athene_and 
Pallas in her austerity, even when she contends for the prize of 
beauty, rejects the mirror and gold ornaments and mingled 
unguents; but, because she is maiden goddess, year by year she 
must renew her virginity by the bath in_the river Inachus. The 


renewal of virginity is no fancy. at Naupha a 


1 Hom. Od. vu. 270. 

2 Hom. Hymn vi. 2, trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray. 

3 At Sekyon, though we are not expressly told of a bath of Aphrodite, she had a 
maiden-priestess who was called Loutrophoros, see P. 11.10. 4. The Orphie Hymn to 
Aphrodite (Lv. 19) joins together the notions of bath and birth: Alyiarrouv Karéxecs 
lepijs youruwdoea Nourpda. 

SOP itopset 





ausanias? Saw 


VI] Aphrodite 313 


spring called Canathus and the Argives told him that every year 
Hera bathed in it and became a virgin. He adds significantly, ‘this 
story is of the mysteries and is their explanation of a rite which 
they celebrate to Hera. Virginity was to these ancients in their 
wisdom a grace not lost but perennially renewed, hence the 
immortal maidenhood of Aphrodite. 

The artist of the Genoa hydria probably knew of the birth of 
Aphrodite from the sea, he certainly knew of her reception by 
Eros; but that he remembered also the ritual bath is, I think, 
clear from the fact that the scene is laid in a sanctuary, indicated 
in the vase-painter’s fashion by the altar and sacred palm-tree 
standing to the right just below the handle. Probably the 
sanctuary at Paphos is intended. 

The Genoa hydria is of great importance because it helps to 
the understanding of another monument, earlier and far more 
beautiful. 

The design in fig. 89 is from a sculptured slab’, one of three 
that served to decorate the so-called ‘Ludovisi Throne’ now in 
the Boncompagni collection in the Museo delle Terme at Rome. 
Again we have manifestly an Anodos, again the like uncertainty 
as to who the goddess is and whence she uprises. The two women 
who support her, and to whom in her uprising she clings, stand on 
a sloping bank of shingle. Between the edges of the banks is no 
indication of the sea, simply a straight line. Is the goddess rising 
from earth or sea or sacred river or ritual bath? Archaeologists 
offer explanations apparently the most diverse, and it is this 
doubt and diversity that instruct. One sees in the design the 
Birth of Aphrodite from the Sea, another a ceremonial Bath at 


1 Reproduced from a photograph. The relief is published and fully discussed 
by Dr Petersen, Rim. Mittheilungen, 1892, Taf. 1. p. 32. The relief with two other 
slabs manifestly belonging to the same structure came to light on a Sunday during 
the summer of 1887, during the absence of the official inspector, in the piece of 
ground formerly belonging to the Villa Ludovisi and now bounded by the Vie 
Boncompagni, Abbruzzi e Piemonte. It is said to have been found in an upright 
position, but as no other monuments came to light, though the ground was 
examined to a depth of 50 metres, the reliefs were probably not in situ. Dr Petersen 
thinks they formed the three sides of a throne of Aphrodite. They may, however, 
have formed part of the decoration of the mouth of a well. That they were in 
some way connected with Aphrodite is practically certain from the design on the 
two other reliefs (not figured here). These represent respectively a nude woman 
playing on the double flutes, who, from the analogy of similar representations on 
vase-paintings, is certainly a hetaira, and a woman draped and veiled bringing 
incense who is probably a bride. The various interpretations and restorations of 
the monument are given by Dr Helbig, Fiihrer Rom u. p. 128, and Antike Denk- 
miler d. K. Arch. Inst. vol. 1. Pl. 6 and 7, p. 3. 


314 The Making of a Goddess [CH. 


the lesser mysteries of Agrae, another the Anodos of Kore. No 
one, so far as I am aware, sees that the artist is haunted by, is as 





Fic. 89. 


it were halting between, reminiscences of each and all. Or rather 
the Anodos, the Bath, the Birth are as yet undifferentiated. By 
their articulation and separation we have immeasurably lost. 

One other point remains. On the Ludovisi relief we have no 
Eros. The relief is archaic. The straight folds of the drapery, 
the delicate over-long feet, the strong chin, the over-emphasis of 
the lovely breasts, all remind us vividly of red-figured vases of the 
severe style; they belong to the last bloom of archaism just before 
the perfect utterance of Pheidias. Pheidias' on the pedestal of 
the image of Zeus at Olympia sculptured ‘ Eros receiving Aphro- 
dite as she rises from the sea and Peitho crowning Aphrodite.’ 
Pheidias was much, perhaps over, inspired by Homeric tradition, 
hence a certain sense of literary chill in his conceptions. He 
forgets the ritual Bath, and remembers the mythological Birth. 
The artist of the Genoa hydria is very near to his tradition, but 


Bt oF am it Pa = 


v1] Aphrodite 315 


the drapery held by Peitho, the altar and the palm-tree, recall 
rather the Bath than the Birth. But the sculptor of the relief 
embodies a tradition more theological, less mythological, than 
either Pheidias or the vase-painter. He is inspired by the Anodos! 
and the Bath, which was but one of its ritual humanized forms, 
and a form that we may venture to call matriarchal. What he is 
concerned to show is the birth and re-birth of Aphrodite, Aphro- 
dite untouched of Eros, eternally virgin, central figure of a Trinity 
of Maidens and, as Ourania, She of the Heavens. 

Aphrodite as island queen comes to have a birth from the sea, 
but a poet remembers that, though she is of the sea and of the 
air, she is of earth also: 

‘We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair, thou art goodly, O Love, 

Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove; 


Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea, 
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee.’ 


Aphrodite the earth-born Kore is also sea-born, as became an 
island Queen, but more than any other goddess she becomes 
Ourania, the Heavenly One, and the vase-painter sets her sailing 
through heaven on her great swan”. She is the only goddess who 
in passing to the upper air yet kept life and reality. Artemis 
becomes unreal from sheer inhumanity; Athene, as we have seen, 
becomes a cold abstraction; Demeter, in Olympus, is but a lovely 
metaphor. As man advanced in knowledge and in control over 
nature, the mystery and the godhead of things natural faded into 
science. Only the mystery of life, and love that begets life, 
remained, intimately realized and utterly unexplained; hence 
Aphrodite keeps her godhead to the end. For a while, owing to 
special social conditions, and, as will be seen, owing to the impulse 
of Orphism, her figure is effaced by that of her son Eros, but 
effaced only to re-emerge with a new dignity as Mother rather 
than Maid. In the image of Venus Genetrix® we have the old 

1 Since the above was written I see that M. Joubin (La Sculpture Grecque entre 
les guerres médiques et Vépoque de Pericles, p. 204) has anticipated me in using the 
Genoa vase as evidence to show that the uprising woman in the Ludovisi relief is 
Aphrodite. But unfortunately M. Joubin fails to see that Aphrodite is also Kore; 
he says, ‘D’autres archéologues avaient identifié le personnage figuré a mi-corps 
avec Koré ou Ge; mais la découverte du vase de Génes eoupe court toutes ces 
interprétations.’ This is to my mind to miss the real religious significance of the 
figure; but M. Joubin is, of course, mainly concerned with artistic criticism. 


2 Brit. Mus. Cat. p 2. The best reproduction of this beautiful vase is plate xv. 
of White Athenian Vases in Brit. Mus. 3 Lucret. 1. 1. 


) 


316 The Making of a Goddess Tom 


radiance of Aphrodite, but sobered somehow, grave with the 
hauntings of earlier godheads, with shadows about her cast by 
Ourania, by Harmonia, by Kourotrophos, by Eirene, by each and 
every various form of the ancient Mother of Earth and Heaven: 


‘Of Rome the Mother, of men and gods the pleasure, 
Fostering Venus, under heaven’s gliding signs 

Thou the ship-bearing sea, fruit-bearing land 

Still hauntest, since by thee each living thing 
Takes life and birth and sees the light of the sun. 


Thee, goddess, the winds fly from, thee the clouds 
And thine approach ; for thee the daedal earth 
Sends up sweet flowers, the ocean levels smile, 
And heaven shines with floods of light appeased. 


Thou, since alone thou rulest all the world 

Nor without thee can any living thing 

Win to the shores of light and joy and love, 
Goddess, bid thou throughout the seas and land 
The works of furious war quieted cease.’ 


HERA. 


The figure of Hera remains. At first sight she seems all wife, 
not maiden; she is the great typical bride, Hera Teleia, queen 
in Olympus by virtue of her marriage with Zeus; their Sacred 
Marriage is the prototype of all human wedlock. This is true for 
Homeric theology, but a moment’s reflection on the tacts of local 
cultus and myth shows that this marriage was not from the 
beginning. The Hera who in the ancient Argonautic legend is 
queen in Thessaly and patrou of the hero Jason is of the old 
matriarchal type; it is she, Pelasgian Hera, not Zeus, who is really 
dominant; in fact Zeus is practically non-existent. In Olympia, 
where Zeus in historical days ruled if anywhere supreme, the 
ancient Heraion where Hera was worshipped alone long predates 
the temple of Zeus. At Argos the early votive terra-cottas’ are 
of a woman goddess, and the very name of the sanctuary, the 
Heraion, marks her supremacy. At Samos, at the curious festival 
of the Zonea*, it is the image of a woman goddess that is carried 

1 As long ago as 1857, H. D. Miiller in his remarkable book Mythologie der 
Griechischen Stiéimme, pp. 249—255, saw that Zeus and Hera belonged to stocks 
racially distinet, and that in the compulsory marriage of Hera to Zeus is reflected 
the subjugation of a primitive race to Achaean invaders. In discussing the 
American excavations at Argos I followed his leading, see ‘ Primitive Hera-Worship,’ 


Cl. Review, Dec. 1892, p. 474, and 1893, p. 44. 
2 Athen. § 672. 


VI] | Hera 17 


out of the town and bound among the bushes, and Strabo’ tells\us 
that in ancient days Samos was called Parthenia, the island of the 
Maiden. At Stymphalus, in remote Arcadia, Pausanias? says that 
Hera had three sanctuaries and three surnames: while yet a girl 
she was called Child, married to Zeus she was called Complete 
or Full-Grown (redeia), separated from Zeus and returned to 
Stymphalus she was called Chera (Widow). Long before her con- 
nection with Zeus, the matriarchal goddess may well have reflected 
the three stages of a woman's life; Teleia, full-grown, does not 
necessarily imply patriarchal marriage. 

Homer himself was dimly haunted by the memory of days 
when Hera was no wife, but Mistress in her own right. Otherwise, 
unless the poet was the lowest of low comedians, what means her 
ceaseless turbulence and the unending unseemly strife between 
the Father of Gods and Men and the woman he cannot even 
beat into submission? What her urgent insistent tyranny over 
Herakles whom Zeus loves yet cannot protect? Is the tyrannous 
mistress really made by the Greek housewife even of Homeric 
days in her own image? The answer is clear: Hera has been 
forcibly married, but she is never really wife, and a wife’s submis- 
sion she leaves to the shadowy double of Zeus, who echoed his 
nature and (significant fact) took his name, she who was the real 
Achaean patriarchal double—Dione’. 

Once fairly married, Zeus and Hera became Sharers of one 
Altar (ouoRe@pcov), and against the conjunction the older women 
divinities are but too often powerless. In the designs* in figs. 90 
and 91 we have a curious instance of the ruthless fashion in 
which the Olympian pair extrude the objects of an ancient local 
cult. In fig. 90 we have a votive relief to the Nymphs of the 
familiar type: three maiden figures linked together. That the 

_ figures are Nymphs is certain, for above is the inscription, ‘To the 
Mistress Nymphs (Kupiats Nvydais). The relief, one of a large 

1 Strab. § 637. 

2 Pp. vit. 22. 2. The sources for the cult of Hera are well collected by 
| Mr Farnell in his Cults of the Greek States, p. 211, but with Mr Farnell’s main 
thesis ‘that her association with Zeus is a primitive factor in the Greek worship of 
| Hera’ I am still as he then notes (p. 199) completely at issue. 

3 Again acutely observed by H. D. Miiller, Mythologie d. Gr. Stiimme, pp. 254, 
255, where the identity of Dione and Juno is noted. 

4 These reliefs are now in the Museum at Sofia: there were discovered in all 


ninety-two of the same type. Bull. de Corr. Hell. xx1. 1897, p. 130, fig. 12; p. 138, 
| fig. 17. 





318 The Making of a Goddess a 


series found together at Orochdk and now in the local Museun 
e 





at Sofia, is of late Roman style. The design in fig. 91 shows 
a theological shift. The two dominant Olympians, of large 





Fic. 91. 


stature to mark their supremacy, occupy the forefront ; they hold 
each an expectant phiale for libations; to them only is sacrifice to 


ee | ' 
v1] Superposition of the Olympians 319 


be made. It is they who hold the sceptres. Humbly in the 
background, minished and all but effaced, are the three ancient 
Maidens. The local peasant is conservative’, and we may hope 
they too had their meed of offering. 

The intrusion of Zeus? and Hera on the local cultus of the 
Nymphs brings to mind a story preserved by Diogenes Laertius® 
in his Life of Epimenides. Theopompus in his ‘Wonderful Things’ 
told how when Epimenides was preparing the sanctuary of the 
Nymphs a voice was heard from heaven saying, ‘ Epimenides, not 
of the Nymphs, but of Zeus.” Perhaps Epimenides went further 
than the orthodox Olympian religion could tolerate in the matter 
of the revival of ancient cults. To him, as has been already seen 
(p. 241), was credited the founding of the sanctuary of the 





Semnae ; he introduced ceremonies of purification brought from 
Crete, and wholly alien to Olympian ritual. It was time for Zeus 
to reassert himself. 


1 The survival of the type of the ‘ Three Sisters’ in mediaeval days has been well 
traced by Miss Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism, p. 40 ff. 

2 Since the above was written Mr A. B. Cook has with great kindness and 
generosity allowed me to read in proof his article on ‘ Zeus, Jupiter and the Oak,’ 
shortly to be published in the Classical Review. Mr Cook believes that the worship 
of Zeus was indigenous in Greece and that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades are three 
forms of one primaeval god. His contention is supported by an immense mass of 
evidence. I am at present unconvinced, but space forbids my entering on the 
controversy here. 

3 Diog. Laert. Vit. Epim. xt. 


320 The Making of a Goddess [cH. 


The conflict of theological conceptions is very clearly seen in 
the design in fig. 92, from a votive relief! found at Eleusis and 
now in the National Museum at Athens. The general type of the 
design, which belongs to the class known in English as ‘ Funeral 
Banquets,’ will be discussed more in detail later, when we come to 
hero-worship. For the present it is enough to note that on the 
left side of the relief we have the two Goddesses of Eleusis, the 
old matriarchal couple, seated side by side as equals, on the right 
a patriarchal couple, man and wife, the man reclining at the 
banquet and holding a great rhyton, the wife submissively seated 
by his side. In naming them it is safest at present not to go 
beyond what is written. The artist has inscribed over their heads 
the non-committal words, ‘To the God,’ and ‘To the Goddess.’ 

It was not only the Olympian Father Zeus who victoriously 
took over to himself the cult of the Earth-Mother and the Earth- 
Maidens. Even more marked is the triumph of the Olympian 
Son, Apollo The design in fig. 93 is from a rather late red- 








figured amphora in the Naples Museum*®. A wayfarer, possibly 
Orestes, has come to Delphi to consult the god; he finds him 


1 Rd. ’Apx. 1866, pl. 3. The ‘patriarchal couple’ are, I incline to think, rightly 
explained by Dr Svoronos (Journal d’Archéol. et Num. 1901, p. 503) as Asklepios 
and Hygieia, but as for my purpose it is not necessary to name them, and as the 
evidence is too detailed to be resumed here, I prefer not to go beyond the inscription. 

2 I follow Prof. Ridgeway in holding that Apollo and his sister Artemis belong 
to the immigrant Achaean stock, see p. 31, note 1. 

%’ Heydemann, Cat. 108. Raoul Rochette, Mon. Inéd. pl. 37. 


P val Superposition of the Olympians 321 


seated on the very omphalos itself, holding the laurel and the lyre in 
his hands. So Hermes found him in the prologue to the Jon of 
Euripides?: 
‘To Delphi, where 
Phoebus, on earth’s mid navel o’er the world 


Enthronéd, weaveth in eternal song 
The sooth of all that is or is to be.’ 


The vase-painter knows quite well that it is really a priestess 
who utters the oracles. Only a priestess can mount the sacred 
tripod, and he paints her so seated, the laurel wreath on her head 
and the sacred taenia in her hand, but he knows also that Apollo 
is by this time Lord of All. 

In the Humenides of Aeschylus, where the contest is between 
the old angry ghosts, the Erinyes envisaged as merely the spirits 
of the blood feud, and the mild and merciful god, our sympathies 





Fic. 94. 


are at least in part with the new-comer. But even here, so 
stately and yet so pitiful are the ancient goddesses that our hearts 
are sore for the outrage on their order. And on the vase-painting, 
when we remember that the omphalos is the very seat and symbol 
of the Earth-Mother’, that hers was the oracle and hers the 


1 Kur. Jon 5. 
2 The evidence for this I haye collected SUSE see ‘Delphika,’ B. The 
Omphalos, J.H.S. 1899, xrx. 225. 


H. 21 


322 The Making of a Goddess [CH. VI 


holy oracular snake that Apollo slew, the intrusion is hard to 
bear. 

The triumph of the Olympian order is still more clearly pre- 
sented in the design in fig. 94, from a votive relief’ in the local 
Museum at Sparta. The centre of the design is occupied by the 
omphalos on a low basis. It looks very humble and obscure. At 
either side of it are perched new guardians, the great eagles of 
Olympian Zeus. The story’ said that starting from either end of 
the world they met at Pytho, at the omphalos. The birds were 
variously said to be swans or eagles. Neither swans nor eagles 
have anything to do with the Earth-goddess; they are Ouranian 
eagles for Zeus or swans for Apollo, and, standing over the omphalos, 
they mark the dominion of the Father and the Son. But the 
artist has uttered his meaning still more emphatically. Towering 

* over the omphalos is the great figure of Apollo with his lyre. He 
holds out a cup, and libation to him is poured by his sister 
Artemis. The Olympian victory is complete. 


So far we have dealt with the Making of a goddess; we have 
seen one woman-form take various shapes as Mother and Maiden, 
as duality and trinity; we have seen these shapes crystallize into 
Olympian divinities as Athene, as Aphrodite, as Hera, and as it 
were resume themselves again into the great monotheistic figure 
of Venus Genetrix. We have noted evidence, very scattered and 
fragmentary, of earlier animal forms of the goddess as bird and 
snake. But it has been obvious enough that the weak point in 
the argument is just this transrtional phase. 7 The goddesses, 
when they first come into our ken, are goddesses, fully human and 
lovely in form, figures whose lineaments have been fixed and 
>» beautified by art, and of mythological rather than of ritual content. 

\SIn a word links are wanting in the transition from ghost or snake 
or bogey to goddess: Two reasons may be mepected \The full 
development of the women divinities seems to have been earlier 
accomplished, the sublimation earlier complete, and hence the 
early phases of that development are more effaced; and next 
these goddess figures became more completely material for poetic 
treatment. In the Making of a god we catch in some figures the 
process at an earlier stage, and many missing links in the passage 
from ghost and snake to Olympian will thereby become manifest. 


1 4. Mitt. 1887, Taf. xn. 2 Plut. de defect. orac. 1. 


CHAPTER VII. 


THE MAKING OF A GOD. 


‘ja @€01 NEWTEPO!, TAAAIOYC NOMOYC 
KAOITITIA CACOE.. 


FREQUENTLY, in his wanderings through Greece, Pausanias 
came upon the sanctuaries of local heroines, and these sanctuaries 
are almost uniformly tombs at which went on the cultus of the 
dead. At Olympia’ inside the Altis he noted the Hippodameion 
or sanctuary of Hippodameia, a large enclosure surrounded by a 
wall. Into this enclosure once a year women were permitted to 
enter to sacrifice to Hippodameia and do other rites in her 
honour. The tomb of Auge’ was still to be seen at Pergamos, 
a mound of earth enclosed by a stone basement and on the top 
the figure of anaked woman. At Leuctra® in Laconia there was 
an actual temple (vaos) of Cassandra with an image; the people 
of the place called her Alexandra, ‘Helper of Men.’ At Sparta* 
Helen had a sanctuary, and in Rhodes she was worshipped as 
She of the Tree, ‘ Dendritis, and to her as Dendritis, if we may 
trust Theocritus*®, maidens brought offerings. At her wedding 
they sing: 


‘O fair, O gracious maiden, the while we chant our lay, 

A wedded wife art thou. But we, at dawning of the day, 

Forth to the grassy mead will go, to our old racing place, 

And gather wreaths of odorous flowers, and think upon thy face, 
Again, again, Helen, on thee, as young lambs in the dew 

Think of the milk that fed them and run back to mother ewe. 
For thee the first of Maidens shall the lotus creeping low 

Be culled to hang in garlands where the shadowy plane doth grow; 
To thee where grows the shadowy plane the first oil shall be poured, 
Drop by drop from a silver cruse, to hold thy name adored : 

And letters on the bark be wrought, for him who goes to see, 

A message graven Dorian-wise: “Kneel; I am Helen’s tree.”’ 


We 2a ty od Mey Zi JPR nates eh, 1) 
P12 sai, Oty 5 oP sae I ee > Theoer. Id. xvu11. 38. 


21—2 


324 The Making of a God [ CH. 


Helen as local heroine had, it would seem, not only a sanctuary 
and a sacred tree but a very ancient image. The design in figs. 
95 and 96 is from a lekythos! in the 
Louvre, of the kind usually known as 
‘proto-Corinthian.’ Its style dates it as 
not later than the 7th century B.c., and it 
it our earliest extant monument of ‘the 


rey, % 
CONS 


: SH 
rape of Helen.” The subject seems to EST BREE 


VOSAS 


have had a certain popularity in archaic 
art, as it occurred on the throne of Apollo 
at Amyclae®. In the centre of the design 
stands a woman-figure of more than natural 
size. Two men advance against her from 
the right; the foremost seizes her by the 
wrist. In his left hand he holds a sceptre. 
He is Theseus, and behind him comes 
Peirithods, brandishing a great sword. To Fie. 95. 





the left of Helen are her two brothers, the 
horsemen Kastor and Polydeukes. It is important to note that 
Helen is here more image than living woman. Dr Blinkenberg, 








Fie. 96. 


who rightly interprets the scene as the rape of Helen, says ‘ses 
mains levées expriment la surprise et leffroi, but since the 
discovery of the early image of the Mycenaean goddess with 
uplifted hands* it will at once be seen that the gesture is hieratic 
rather than human. This early 7th century document suggests 
that ‘the rape of Helen’ was originally perhaps the rape of a 
xoanon from a sanctuary, rather than of a wife from her husband. 


1 Inv. C.A. 617. Published by M. L. Couve, Revue Archéologique, 1898, p. 213, 
figs. 1 and 2, and discussed by Dr Blinkenberg, 1898, p. 398. 

A Ver son less, Way 
ee 3 Dr SS. Wide, ‘Mykenische Gétterbilder und Idole,’ A. Mitt. 1901, p. 247, 
8 Ge 


eee irs a. "= 
vir} Local Heroine-worship 325 


Be that as it may, the great dominant hieratic figure on the vase 
is more divine than human. 

For Homer, poet of the immigrant Achaeans, Helen of the old 
order of daughters of the land is a mortal heroine, beautiful and 
sinful, yet in a sense divine. To the modern poet she is altogether 
goddess, for she is Beauty herself: 


*‘O Light and Shadow of all things that be, 
O Beauty, wild with wreckage like the sea, 

Say, who shall win thee, thou without a name? 
O Helen, Helen, who shall die for thee ?’ 

Hebe, another local heroine, has at Phlius’ a sacred grove and 
a sanctuary, ‘most holy from ancient days. The goddess of the 
sanctuary was called by the earliest authorities of the place 
Ganymeda, but later Hebe. Her sanctuary was an asylum, and 
this was held to be her greatest honour that ‘slaves who took 
refuge there were safe and prisoners released hung their fetters 
on the trees in her grove. That a sanctuary should be an asylum 
is a frequent note of antiquity. When the immigrant conqueror 
reduces the whole land to subjection, he, probably from super- 
stitious awe, leaves to the conquered their local sanctuary, the 
one place safe from his tyranny. Hebe-Ganymeda, female corre- 
lative of Ganymedes, is promoted to Olympus, but significantly 
she is admitted only as cupbearer and wife of Herakles. Olympus 
here as always mirrors human relations. Hera by marriage with 
Zeus is admitted to full patriarchal citizenship, her shadowy double 
Hebe is but her Maid of Honour. 

As a rule then the local heroine remains merely the object of 
a local cult. Where she passed upward to the rank of a real 
divinity, the steps of transition are almost wholly lost. We feel 
inwardly sure that Hera and Aphrodite were once of mere local 
import, like Auge or Iphigeneia, but we lack definite evidence. 
In the case of Athene the local origin, it has been shown (p. 301), 
is fairly clear. 

The reason why the local heroine failed to emerge to complete \ 
godhead is sometimes startlingly clear. Her development was 
checked midway by the intrusion of a full-blown goddess of the 
Olympian stock. Near to Cruni in Arcadia Pausanias* saw the 
grave of Callisto. It was a high mound on which grew trees, 


1 oo Bs Be 2 Pp. vu. 35. 8. 


326 The Making of a God [ CH. 


some of them fruit-bearing, some barren. ‘On the top of the 
mound, Pausanias adds, ‘is a sanctuary of Artemis with the title 
Calliste. Nothing could be clearer. Over the tomb of the old 
Bear- Maiden, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis the Northerner, 
the Olympian, has superposed her cult, and to facilitate the shift 
she calls herself Calliste, the Fairest. Possibly here, as at Athens 
under the title of Brauronia, she kept up the ancient bear- 
service}, 

The passage from ghost to goddess is for the most part lost 
in the mists of time, but of the analogous process from ghost to 
god the steps are still in historical times clearly traceable. The 
reason is clear. The intrusion of the patriarchal system, the 
practice of tracing descent from the father instead of the mother, 
tended to check, if it was powerless wholly to stop, the worship 
of eponymous heroines. Conservatism compelled the worship 
of old established heroines, but no fresh canonizations took 
place. The ideal woman of Pericles was assuredly not the stuff 
of which goddesses were made. If we would note the actual 
process of the manufacture of divinity, it is to hero-worship we 
must turn’. 


THE HERO AS SNAKE. 


The design in fig. 97 is from an archaic relief* of the sixth 
century B.c., now in the local Museum at Sparta. It forms one 
of a series of reliefs found near Sparta, all of which are cast 
approximately in the same type. A male and a female figure are 
seated side by side on a great throne-like chair. The female 
figure holds her veil, the male figure a large cantharus or two- 
handled cup, as if expecting libation. Worshippers of diminutive 


1 For the bear-service of Artemis and the bear dedicated to her, see Myth. and 
Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 403. 

2 The materials for the study of hero-worship are well collected in Roscher’s 
Lexicon, s.v. Heroes, and for English readers there is an excellent survey in 
Mr W. H. D. Rouse’s Greek Votive Offerings, c. 1. In the pages that follow I confine 
myself for the most part to such aspects of hero-worship as affect my main argument, 
and to certain evidence from art which seems to me to have been neglected, or 
misunderstood. I must also note that, advisedly, I only deal with the ‘Making of 
a God’ in so far as the god developes out of the hero. The most important and 
far more difficult question of the relation between totemism and god-making, a 
problem for the solution of which Greek tradition provides but scanty material, 
I leave for the present untouched. It can only be decided by much wider anthropo- 
logical investigation than is within my scope. 

3 A. Mitt. 1877; pl.:xx: 


nil ila See hoe 
VII] The Hero as Snake aoe 


size approach with offerings—a cock and some object that may 
be a cake, an egg or a fruit. The reliefs are, for the most part, 
uninscribed, but on some of rather later date names are written 





Fic. 97. 


near the figure, and they are the names of mortals, e.g. ‘Timocles*’ 
It is clear that we have in these monuments representations of 
the dead, but the dead conceived of as half divine, as heroized— 
hence their large size compared with that of their worshipping 
descendants. They are xpeitroves, ‘ Better and Stronger Ones.’ 
The artist of the relief in fig. 97 is determined to make his 
meaning clear. Behind the chair, equal in height to the seated 
figures, is a great curled snake, but a snake strangely fashioned. 
From the edge of his lower lip hangs down a long beard; a 


1 For the ‘Timocles’ relief and for the whole class in general, see Myth. and Mon. 
Anc. Athens, p. 590, where I have discussed the influence of the typography of 
these hero-reliefs on Attic gravestones. 


328 The Making of a God [ CH. 


decoration denied by nature. The intention is clear; he is a 
human snake, the vehicle, the incarnation of the dead man’s ghost. 
Snakes lurk about tombs, they are uncanny-looking beasts, and the 
Greeks are not the only people who have seen in a snake the 
vehicle of a ghost. M. Henri Jumod?, in discussing the beliefs of 
the Barongas, notes that among this people the snake is regarded 
as the chikonembo or ghost of a dead man, usually of an ancestor. 
The snake, so regarded, is feared but not worshipped. A free- 
thinker among the Barongas, if bored by the too frequent re- 
appearance of the snake ancestor, will kill it, saying ‘Come now, 
we have had enough of you, 

Zeus Meilichios, it has been seen (p. 18), was worshipped as a 
snake. If we examine the great snake on his relief in fig. 1 (p. 18) it 
is seen to be also bearded. The beard in this case is not at the 
end of the lip, but a good deal further back. 

The addition of the beard was no doubt mainly due to frank 
anthropomorphism ; the snake is in a transition stage between 
animal and human, and human for the artist means divine. He 
gives the snake a beard to mark his anthropomorphic divinity, 
just as he gave to the bull river-god on coins a human head with 
horns. The further question arises, ‘ Was there anything in nature 
that might have acted as a possible suggestion of a beard?’ An 
interesting answer to this question has been suggested to me by 
an eminent authority on snakes, Dr Hans Gadow, and to him 
I am indebted for the following scientific particulars. 

The snake represented in fig. 1 (p. 18) Dr Gadow believes to be 
the species known as Coelopeltis lacertina. It occurs from Spain 
to Syria and specimens of 6 ft. long are not uncommon. The 
creature’s head, according to Dr Gadow, is reproduced with ad- 
mirable fidelity; the name lacertina is due to the lizard-like, 
instead of snake-like, depressed head. Moreover this species is 
really poisonous, but only to its proper prey, e.g. mice, rats, lizards, 
etc., while it is practically harmless to man, on account of the 
position of the poison fangs, which are far back in the mouth 
instead of near the front. This is a somewhat exceptional arrange- 
ment and probably well known to the ancients. In fact the 
Coelopeltis lacertina is a snake with poison that does not ordinarily 
strike. On occasion it could bite a man’s hand, ie. if it opened 

1 H. Jumod, Les Barongas, p. 396, and see ‘Delphika,’ J.H.S. xrx. 1899, p. 216. 


OO —E 


vir The Hero as Snake 329 


its mouth very wide, as wide as a striking cobra. This position of 
the dropped jaw, according to Dr Gadow, is very noticeable and 
must have been observed by the ancients. The angle of the 
dropped jaw is just that of the beard on the snake in fig. 1 (p. 18). 
It seems possible and even highly probable that the dropped jaw, 
seen at a distance, might have suggested a beard, or that an artist 
representing an actual dropped jaw may have been copied by 
another who misinterpreted the jaw into a beard. In any case 
the scheme of the dropped jaw would be ready to hand and would 
help to soften the anomaly of the bearded snake’. 


In snake form the hero dwelt in his tomb, and to indicate this 
fact not uncommonly on vase-paintings we have a snake depicted 
on the very grave mound itself. The design in fig. 98, from a black- 


aoe GIP PLLLIIFIS SG SASS 
29> 








Fie. 98. 


figured lekythos? in the Museum at Naples, is a good instance. 
The funeral mound which occupies the centre of the design is, on 
the original vase, white, and on it is painted a black snake ; the 
mound itself is surmounted by a black stele: whether the vase- 
painter regards his snake as painted actually outside the tomb or 
as representing the snake-hero actually resident within, is not 

1 Mr F. M. Cornford kindly points out to me that the bearded snake is not 
unknown to Greek literature. He is one of the many @avuara that meet us in the 
life of Apollonius of Tyana, see Philostr. Vit. Apoll. m1. 7 and 8. These snakes 


belong to the wonder land of India. 
2 Published and discussed, ‘Delphika,’ J.H.S. x1x. 1899, p. 229, figs. 9 and 10. 


330 The Making of a God [ CH. 


easy to determine. The figure of a man on the left of the tomb 
with uplifted sword points probably to the taking of an oath, it 
may be of vengeance. 

In the curious*design in fig. 99, from a kotylos also in the 
Naples Museum!, we have again a funeral mound, again decorated 





Fic. 99. 


with a huge snake, this time represented with dropped jaw and 
beard. The tomb seems to have become a sort of mantic shrine. 
Two men are seated watching attentively the portent of the eagle 
and the snake. On the reverse of the vase, to the right, the tomb- 
mound is decorated with a stag, and the portent is an eagle 
devouring a_ hare. ' 

Herodotus? notes that among the Libyan tribe of the Nasa- 
mones tombs were used for two purposes, for the taking of oaths 
and for dream oracles. ‘In their oaths and in the art of divimation 
they observe the following practice: they take oaths by those 
among them who are accounted to be most virtuous and excellent, 
by touching their tombs, and when they divine they regularly 
resort to the monuments of their ancestors, and having made 
supplication they go to sleep, and whatever vision they behold of 
that they make use.’ Herodotus like many travellers was more 
familiar, it would seem, with the customs of foreigners than with 
those of his own people. He notes the two customs as though 
they were alien curiosities, but the practice of swearing on a 

1 Cat. 2458. J.H.S. 1899, p. 227, figs. 7 and 8. I have here discussed and 


rejected a possible mythological interpretation. 
* Herod. rv. 172. 


vit] The Hero as Snake 331 


tomb must have been familiar to the Greeks. The slave in the 
Choephori says to Electra’: 


*Reverencing thy father’s tomb like to an altar, 
Mine inmost thoughts I speak, doing thy hest.’ 

By the hero Sosipolis at Olympia® oaths were taken ‘on the 
greatest occasions’—by Sosipolis who in true hero-fashion was wont 
to appear in snake-form. That these oaths were taken on his 
actual tomb we are not told, but the sanctuary of a snake-hero 
can scarcely in its origin have been other than his tomb. Almost 
every hero in Greece had his dream oracle. Later as the hero 
was conceived of as in human rather than animal shape the 
connection between hero and snake is loosened, and we get the 
halting, confused theology of Aeneas’ : 


‘Doubtful if he should deem the gliding snake 
The genius of the place, or if it were 
His father’s ministrant.’ 

In fig. 100 we have an altar to a hero found in Lesbos‘, not the old 
primitive grave mound which was the true 
original form, but a late decorative struc- 
ture such as might have served an Olym- 
pian. It is inscribed in letters of Roman 
date, ‘The people to Aristandros the hero, 
son of Cleotimos, and that the service is 
to a hero is further emphasized by the 
snakes sculptured on the top round the 
hollow cup which served for libations. 
There are two snakes; it is no longer 
realized that the hero himself is a snake, 
but the snake reminiscence clings. 





If the question be raised, ‘why did the 
Greeks image the dead hero as a snake?’ 
no very certain or satisfactory answer can be offered. Aelian® in 
his treatise on ‘The Nature of Animals’ says that the backbone 
of a dead man when the marrow has decayed turns into a snake. 
The chance, sudden apparition of a snake near a dead body may 


Fie. 100. 


1 Aesch. Choeph. 105. a eY syn PAD Be 3 Verg. den. v. 95. 
+ A. Conze, Reise in der Insel Lesbos, Pl. rv. fig. 5, p. 11. 
5 Ael. Hist. An. 1. 51. 


34 The Making of a God [ CH. 


have started the notion. Plutarch’ tells how, when the body of 
Cleomenes was impaled, the people, seeing a great snake wind 
itself about his head, knew that he was ‘more than mortal’ 
(xpettrovos). Of course, by the time of Cleomenes, the snake was 
well established as the vehicle of a hero, but some such coinci- 
dence may very early have given rise to this association of ideas. 
Plutarch adds that ‘the men of old time associated the snake 
most of all beasts with heroes.’ They did this because, he says, 
philosophers had observed that ‘when part of the moisture of the 
marrow is evaporated and it becomes of a thicker consistency it 
produces serpents.’ 

The snake was not the only vehicle. As has already been 
noted (p. 305), the spirit of the dead could take shape as a human- 
headed bird or even perhaps, if a bird happened to perch on 
a tomb, as a mere natural hoopoe or swallow. Between the bird- 
souls and the snake-souls there is this difference. So far as we 
know, the human-headed bird was purely a creature of mythology, 
whereas the bearded human snake was the object of a cult. Also 
the bird-soul, though sometimes male, tends, on the whole, to be a 
woman ; the snake, even when not bearded, is usually the vehicle 
of a male ghost; as such he is the incarnation rather of the hero 
than the heroine. So close is the connection that it gave rise to 
the popular expression ‘ Speckled hero, which arose, Photius? 
explains, because snakes which are speckled are called heroes. 
Of these snake-heroes and their cultus Homer knows absolutely 
nothing, but the belief in them is essentially primitive and 
recrudesces with other popular superstitions. 


1 Plut. Vit. Cleom. 39. 

2 Phot. s.v. jpws moxtdos. After Christian days the notion started by the 
Olympian religion that the snake was bad was strengthened by association with 
the ‘old serpent’ of Semitic mythology. Mr R. C. Bosanquet kindly drew my 
attention to a curious survival of the belief that a bad soul takes the form of 
a snake in the account of the life and miracles of the fifth century saint, St Marcellus 
(Boll. Acta Sanctorum 1—3, vol. uxur. of the whole series, pp. 259 and 267). 
It was related that a certain matron of noble family, but bad character, died and 
was buried with great pomp. ‘Ergo ad consumendum ejus cadaver coepit serpens 
immanissimus frequentare, et, ut dicam clarius, mulieri, cujus membra bestia 
devorabat, ipse draco factus est sepultura.’ St Marcellus subdued the snake by 
striking it thrice with his staff and putting his prayer-book on its head. To the 
present day among the Greeks an unbaptized child, who is not yet quite human 
(Xpiorcavés), is sometimes spoken of as a snake-monster (dSpdxos) and is apt to 
disappear in snake form. For the dpaxos see Abbott, Macedonian Folklore, p. 261. 


vir] | The Cultus-Titles 333 


THE CULTUS-TITLES. 


The great snake, later worshipped as Zeus Meilichios, was, we 
have already seen (p. 21), not Zeus himself, but an under- 
world being addressed by the title Meilichios, gracious, kindly, 
easy to be intreated. It will now be evident that his snake form 
marks him as the vehicle or incarnation of a ghost, a local hero. 
He was only one of a large class of local divinities who were 
invoked not by proper names but by adjectival epithets, de- 
scriptive of their nature, epithets which gradually crystallized 
into cultus-titles. That these titles were really adjectival is 
shown sometimes by the actual word, e.g. Mezlichios, which re- 
tains its adjectival sense, sometimes by the fact that it is taken on 
as a distinguishing epithet by an Olympian, e.g. Zeus-Amphiaraos. 
These cultus-titles mark an important stage in the making of a 
god and must be examined somewhat more in detail. 

Herodotus’ in discussing the origins of Greek theology makes 
the following significant statement: ‘The Pelasgians formerly 
made all sorts of sacrifice to the gods and invoked them in prayer, 
as I know from what I heard in Dodona, but they gave to none 
of them either name or eponym, for such they had not yet heard: 
they addressed them as gods because they had set all things in 
order and ruled over all things. Then after a long lapse of time 
they learnt the names of the other gods which had come from 
Egypt and much later that of Dionysos. As time went on they 
inquired of the oracle at Dodona about these names, for the 
oracle there is held to be the most ancient of all the oracles in 
Greece and was at that time the only one. When therefore the’ 
Pelasgians inquired at Dodona whether they should adopt the 
names that came to them fromthe barbarians, the oracle or- 
dained that they should use them. And from that time on they 
sacrificed to the gods making use of their names.’ 

If the gods were in these primitive days invoked in prayer, 
some sort of name, some mode of address they must have 
had. Is it not at least possible that the advance noted by 
Herodotus is the shift from mere cultus-title, appropriate to any 


se / 
1 Herod. 11. 51 @eovs bre kébcum Oévtes. Herodotus according to the fashion of 
his day derives @eot from the root de, to put in order. 


334 The Making of a God [on. 


and every divinity, to actual proper name which defined and 
crystallized the god addressed? Any and every hero or divinity 
might rightly be addressed as Meilichios, but a single individual 
personality is caught and crystallized in the proper name Zeus. 
When an epithet lost its adjectival meaning, as is the case with 
Amphiaraos, then and not till then did it denote an individual 
god. Apollo, Artemis, Zeus himself, may have been adjectival 
to begin with, mere cultus epithets, but their meaning once lost 
they have become proper and personal. 

It is significant that the shift is said to have taken place 
owing to an oracle at Dodona. There, accepting Prof. Ridgeway’s* 
theory, was the first clash of Pelasgian and Achaean, there Zeus 
and his shadow-wife Dione displaced the ancient Earth-Mother 
with her dove-priestesses; there surely the Pelasgians with their 
‘nameless’ gods, their heroes and heroines addressed by cultus 
epithets, met and mingled with the worshippers of Zeus the 
Father and Apollo the Son and Artemis his sister, and learnt to 
fix the personalities of their formless shifting divinities, learnt the 
lesson not from the ancient civilized Egyptians but from the 
northern ‘ barbarians.’ 

The word hero itself is adjectival. A gloss in Hesychius’ tells 
us that by hero was meant ‘ mighty, ‘strong, ‘noble,’ ‘ venerable.’ 
In Homer the hero is the strong man alive, mighty in battle; in 
cultus the hero is the strong man after death, dowered with a greater, 
because a ghostly, strength. The dead are, as already noted, «pett- 
roves, ‘ Better and Stronger Ones.’ The avoidance of the actual 
proper name of a dead man is an instructive delicate decency and 
lives on to-day. The newly dead becomes, at least for a time, 
‘He’ or ‘She’; the actual name is felt too intimate. It is a 
part of the tendency in all primitive and shy souls, a tendency 
already noted (p. 214), to remove a little whatever is almost too 
close, to call your friend ‘the kind one, or ‘ the old one,’ or ‘the 
black one,’ and never name his silent name. Of course the 
delicate instinct soon crystallizes into definite ritual prescription, 


1 Prof. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. 1. p. 8339. Aristotle distinctly states 
that the region round Dodona was ‘ancient Greece,’ see Ar. Meteor. 1. 12. 9 aiirn dé 
(7 ‘Edas 4 dpxata) éoriv 7 mepl Thy Awddyny cal rov ’Axed@ov...@Kouv yap ol Séor 
evravda kat ol KaNovmevor Tore ev Vpacxol viv 6é"EAAnves, see Prof. Bury, J.H.S. xv. 
p. 217. . 

* Hesych. s.v. 7pws* duvardés, loxupds, yevvatos, ceuvds. 


vit] The. ‘ blameless’ Aigisthos 335 


and gathers about it the practical cautious utilitarianism of 
de mortuis nil nisi bene. 


It is often said that the Greeks were wont to address their 
heroized dead and underworld divinities by ‘euphemistic’ titles, 
-Eumenides for Erinyes, ypnoré, ‘Good One, when they meant 
‘Bad One.’ Such is the ugly misunderstanding view of scholiasts 
and lexicographers. But a simpler, more human explanation lies to 
hand. The dead are, it is true, feared, but they are also loved, 
felt to be friendly, they have been kin on earth, below the earth 
they will be kind. But in primitive days it is only those who 
have been kin who will hereafter be kind; the ghosts of your 
enemies kin will be unkind; if to them you apply kindly epi- 
thets it is by a desperate euphemism, or by a mere mechanical 
usage. 

Of such euphemism Homer’ has left us a curious example. 
Zeus would fain remind the assembled gods of the blindness and 
fatuity of mortal man : 

‘Then spake the Sire of Gods and Men, and of the Blameless One, 
Aigisthos, he bethought him, whom Agamemnon’s son, 
Far-famed Orestes, slew.’ 

Aigisthos, traitor, seducer, murderer, craven, is ‘the Blameless 
One.’ The outraged morality of the reader is in instant protest. 
These Olympians, these gods ‘ who live at ease,’ go too far. 

The epithets in Homer are often worn very thin, but here, 
once the point is noted’, it is manifest that auvpor, ‘the Blame- 
less One,’ is a title perfectly appropriate to Aigisthos as a dead 
hero. Whatever his life on the upper earth, he has joined the 
company of the «peitroves, ‘the Stronger and Better Ones. The 
epithet auvpov in Homer is applied to individual heroes, to a 
hero’s tomb*, to magical, half-mythical peoples like the Phaea- 
cians and Aethiopians* who to the popular imagination are half 
canonized, to the magic island® of the god Helios, to the imaginary, 
half-magical Good Old King®. It is used also of the ‘convoy’’ 
sent by the gods, which of course is magical in character; it is 
never, I believe, an epithet of the Olympians themselves. There 

1 Hom. Od. 1. 29. 
2 IT owe this explanation of duvmwy entirely to Mr Gilbert Murray. 


3 Hom. Od. xxiv. 80. Pr hari OR 
50d; x11) 2615 6 Od. x1x. 109. G TieviIn (As 


336 The Making of a God [CH. 


is about the word a touch of what is dead and demonic rather 
than actually divine. 

Homer himself is ignorant of, or at least avoids all mention of, 
the dark superstitions of a primitive race; he knows nothing at 
least ostensibly of the worship of the dead, nothing of the cult at 
his tomb, nothing of his snake-shape ; but Homer's epithets came 
to him already crystallized and came from the underlying stratum 
of religion which was based on the worship of the dead. And here 
comes in a curious complication. To Homer, though he calls him 
mechanically, or if we like ‘euphemistically,’ the ‘ Blameless One,’ 
Aigisthos is really bad, though not perhaps so black as Aeschylus 
painted him. But was he bad in the eyes of those who first 
made the epithet? The story of Aigisthos is told by the mouth 
of the conquerors. Aigisthos is of the old order, of the primitive 


' population, there before the coming of the family of Agamemnon. 


| Thyestes, father of Aigisthos, had been banished* from his home ; 


Aigisthos is reared as an alien and returns to claim his own. 
Clytaemnestra too was of the old order, a princess of the primitive 
dwellers in the land, regnant in her own right. Agamemnon leaves 
her, leaves her significantly in the charge of a bard’, one of those 
bards pledged to sing the glory of the conquering Achaeans, 
and the end is inevitable: she reverts to the prince of the old stock, 
Aigisthos, to whom we may even imagine she was plighted before 
her marriage to Agamemnon. Menelaos in like fashion marries a 
princess of the land and his too are the sorrows of the king- 
consort. The tomb of Aigisthos was shown to Pausanias*. We 
hear of no cult ; possibly under the force of hostile epic tradition it 
dwindled and died, but in old days we may be sure ‘the Blame- 
less One’ had his meed of service at Argos, and the epithet itself 
remains as eternal witness. 

Salmoneus to the Achaean mind was scarcely more ‘Blameless’ 
than Aigisthos and yet he too bears the epithet. In the Nekuia‘ 
Odysseus says : 


‘Then of the throng of women-folk first Tyro I did see, 
Child of Salmoneus, Blameless One, a noble sire he.’ 


1 Aesch. Choeph. 1586. Prof. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, vol. 1. p. 97, has 
pointed out that Agamemnon and Menelaos were new-comers, and that Helen was 
of the indigenous stock. I venture to suggest that Aigisthos and Clytaemnestra 
belong also to the ‘ Pelasgian’ stratum. 

2 Hom. Od. m1. 267. GPE rr LG ers + Hom. Od. xt. 235. 


vu | Euphemistic Epithets 337 


The case of Salmoneus is highly significant. He too belongs to 
the old order, as indeed do all the Aeolid figures connected with 
the group of dead heroines, and more, in his life he was in violent 
opposition to the new gods. To Hesiod’ he is ‘the Unjust One’ 
(aédvxos). He even dared to counterfeit the thunder and lightning 
of Zeus, and Zeus enraged slew him with a thunderbolt. The 
vase-painting already discussed (p. 60) is the very mirror of the 
picture drawn by Vergil’ of the insolent king: 

‘Through the Greek folk, midway in Elis town 


In triumph went he; for himself, mad man, 

Honours divine he claimed.’ 
To every worshipper of the new order his crime must have seemed 
heinous and blasphemous, but among his own people he was 
glorious before death and probably ‘ Blameless’ after. 

The case of Tityos, Son of Earth, presents a close parallel, 
though Tityos never bore the title of ‘Blameless. To the orthodox 
worshipper of the Olympians he was the vilest of criminals; as 
such Homer*® knew him: 

‘For he laid hands on Leto, the famous bride of Zeus, 

What time she fared to Pytho through the glades of Panopeus.’ 
And for this his sin he lay in Hades tortured for ever. This is 
from the Olympian point of view very satisfactory and instructive, 
but when we turn to local tradition Tityos is envisaged from 
quite another point of view. Strabo‘, when he visited Panopeus, 
learnt that it was the fabled abode of Tityos. He reminds us 
that it was to the island of Euboea that, according to Homer’, the 
Phaeacians conducted fair-haired Rhadamanthys that he might 
see Tityos, Son of Earth. We wonder for a moment why the 
just Rhadamanthys should care to visit the criminal. Homer 
leaves us in doubt, but Strabo makes the mystery clear. On 
Euboea, he says, they show a ‘cave called Elarion from Elara who 
was mother to Tityos, and a hero-shrine of Tityos, and some kind 
of honours are mentioned which are paid to him.’ One ‘blameless’ 


1 Hes. frg. ap. Schol. Pind. Pyth. 1v. 253. 

2 Verg. Aen. vi. 585. Hygin. Fab. 61. Salmoneus, not Athamas, is I think 
represented on'the Chicago vase (fig. 8) as holding the thunderbolt of Zeus; the 
vase has been rightly explained by Mr A. B. Cook, Cl. Rev. July 1903, p. 276. It 
will later (Chap. x1.) be shown that the canonical Hades was peopled by these heroes 
of an early racial stratum. 

3 Od. x1. 576. 4 Strab. rx. 3 § 423. 5 Od. vit. 323. 


H. a2 


338 The Making of a God [ CH. 


hero visits another, that is all. Golden-haired Rhadamanthys 
found favour with the fair-haired Achaeans: but for Tityos, the 
son of Earth, there is no place in the Northern Elysium. 


We may take it then that the ‘euphemistic’ epithets were 
applied at first in all simplicity and faith to heroes and under- 
world gods by the race that worshipped them. The devotees 
of the new Achaean religion naturally regarded the heroes and 
saints of the old as demons. Such was in later days the charitable 
view taken by the Christian fathers of the Olympian gods in their 
turn. All the activities that were uncongenial, all the black side 
of things, were carefully made over by the Olympians to the 
divinities they had superseded. Only here and there the un- 
conscious use of a crystallized epithet like ‘ Blameless’ lets out 
the real truth. The ritual prescription that heroes should be 
worshipped by night, their sacrifice consumed before dawn, no 
doubt helped the conviction that as they loved the night their 
deeds were evil. Their ritual too was archaic and not lacking in 
savage touches. At Daulis* Pausanias tells of the shrine of a 
hero-founder. It was evidently of great antiquity, for the people 
of the place were not agreed as to who the hero was; some said 
Phocos, some Xanthippos. Service was done to him every day, 
and when animal sacrifice was made the Phocians poured the 
blood of the victim through a hole into the grave; the flesh was 
consumed on the spot. Such plain-sppken ritual would go far to 
promote the notion that the hero was bloodthirsty. 

Sometimes a ritual prescription marks clearly the antipathy 
between old and new, between the hero and the Olympian. 
Pausanias” describes in detail the elaborate ceremonial observed 
in sacrificing to Pelops at Olympia. The hero had a large 
temenos containing trees and statues and surrounded by a stone 
wall, and the entrance, as was fitting for a hero, was towards the 
west. Sacrifice was done into a pit and the victim was a black 
ram. Pausanias ends his account with the significant words: 
‘Whoever eats of the flesh of the victim sacrificed to Pelops, 
whether he be of Elis or a stranger, may not enter the temple of 
Zeus. But we are glad to know from Pindar® that no spiteful 


1 Pix 40} 4 Pied 
8 Pind. Ol. 1. 90 schol. ad loc, 


vir | Heroes and Olympians 339 


ritual prescription of the Olympian could dim the splendour of the 
local hero : 

‘In goodly streams of flowing blood outpoured 

Upon his tomb, beside Alpheios’ ford, 

Now hath he still his share; 

Frequent and full the throng that worship there.’ 
The scholiast comments on the passage: ‘Some say that it was 
not (merely) a tomb but a sanctuary of Pelops and that the 
followers of Herakles sacrificed to him before Zeus.’ 

At yet another great Pan-Hellenic centre there is the memory, 
though more faded, of the like superposition of cults. The 
scholiast on Pindar’ says that the contest at Nemea was of the 
nature of funeral games (€7rerdduos) and that it was in honour of 
Archemoros, but that later, after Herakles had slain the Nemean 
lion, he ‘took the games in hand and put many things to rights 
and ordered them to be sacred to Zeus.’ ; 

More commonly there is between the Olympian and the hero 
all appearance of decent friendliness. A compromise is effected ; 
the main ritual is in honour of the Olympian, but to the hero is 
offered a preliminary sacrifice. A good instance of this procedure 
is the worship of Apollo at Amyclae? superposed on that of the 
local hero Hyakinthos. The great bronze statue of Apollo stood 
on a splendid throne, the decorations of which Pausanias describes 
in detail. The image itself was rude and ancient, the lower part 
pillar-shaped, but for all that the god was a new-comer. ‘The 
basis of the image was in form like an altar, and they say 
that Hyakinthos was buried in it, and at the festival of the 
Hyakinthia before the burnt sacrifice (@vcias) to Apollo, they 
devote offerings (évayifovery) to Hyakinthos into this altar through 
a bronze door.’ 

Apollo and Hyakinthos established a modus vivendi. Apollo 
instituted his regular Olympian sacrifices (@vatar) and left to 
Hyakinthos his underworld offerings (€vayiowata). But not every 
Olympian was so successful. Ritual is always tenacious. So too 
at Delphi, Apollo may seat himself on the omphalos, but he is 
still forced to utter his oracles through the mouth of the priestess 


1 Schol. ad hyp. Nem. ‘O ayav (rév Neuéwy) éexirdduos ert ’Apxeudpw...torepov 
6é vixnoas “Hpak)jjs...€meuedjOn Tod dyavos Ta ToANG avopPwoduevos Kat Atos eivar 
lepov évomobérnce. 

Zeit. LOS 3: 


22—2 


340 The Making of a God [ CH. 


of Gaia. Zeus, we have seen, arrogated to himself the title of 
Meilichios; he had the old snake reliefs dedi¢ated to him, but he 
was powerless to change the ritual of the hero, and had to content 
himself, like an underworld god, with holocausts. All that he 
could do was to emphasize the untruth that he, not the hero, was 
Meilichios, Easy to be intreated. 

All that could be effected by theological animus was done. 
It has been seen (p. 9) how in the fable of Babrius the hero- 
ancestor is positively forbidden to give good things, and meekly 
submits; and, long before Babrius, the blackening process had set 
in. The bird-chorus in Aristophanes’ tells of the strange sights 
it has seen on earth: 


‘We know of an uncanny spot, 

Very dark, where the candles are not; 

There to feast with the heroes men go 

By day, but at evening, oh no! 

For the night time is risky you know. 
If the hero Orestes should meet with a mortal by night, 
He’d strip him and beat him and leave him an elegant sight.’ 


Orestes was of course a notable local thief, but the point of the 
joke is the ill-omened character of a hero. The scholiast says that 
‘heroes are irascible and truculent to those they meet and possess 
no power over what is beneficial.’ He cites Menander as his 
authority, but adds on his own account that this explains the 
fact that ‘those who go past hero-shrines keep silence.’ So 
easy is it to read a bad meaning into a reverent custom. So 
possessed are scholiasts and lexicographers by the Olympian 
prejudice that, even when the word they explain is dead against 
a bad interpretation, they still maintain it. Hesychius?, explaining 
Kpeittovas, ‘ Better or Stronger Ones,’ says ‘they apply the title 
to heroes, and they seem to be a bad sort of persons; it is on this 
account that those who pass hero-shrines keep silence lest the 
heroes should do them some harm.’ Among gods, as among 
mortals, one rule holds good: the king can do no wrong and the 
conquered no right. 


1 Ay, Av. 1482, schol. ad loc. Athenaeus (x1. 4 § 461) gives the same account of 
the character of heroes: xaerods yap Kal mAjKras Tods Howas voulfoucr. 
2 Hesych. s.v. xpelrrovas. 


Jal BASS ete ee | i ak be 


vir} Heroes of Healing 341 


ASKLEPIOS AND THE HEROES OF HEALING. 


Heroes, like the ghosts from which they sprang, had of course 
their black angry side, but, setting aside the prejudice of an 
Olympianized literature, it is easy to see that in local cultus they 
would tend rather to beneficence. The ghost you worship and 
who by your worship is erected into a hero is your kinsman, and 
the ties of kinship are still strong in the world below. ‘In almost 
all West African districts,’ says Miss Mary Kingsley’, ‘is a class of 
spirits called “ Well-disposed Ones” and this class is clearly 
differentiated from “Them,” the generic term for non-human 
spirits. These “ Well-disposed Ones” are ancestors and they do 
what they can to benefit their particular village or family fetish 
who is not a human spirit or ancestor.’ So it was with the Greek ; 
he was careful not to neglect or offend his local hero, but on the 
whole he relied on his benevolence : 


‘When a man dies we all begin to say 

The sainted one has passed away, he has ‘fallen asleep,’ 

Blessed therein that he is vexed no more. 

And straight with funeral offerings we do sacrifice 

As to a god and pour libations, bidding . 

Him send good things up here from down below?’ 
The cult of heroes had in it more of human ‘tendance’ than of 
demonic ‘aversion.’ 

The hero had for his sphere of beneficence the whole circle 
of human activities. Like all primitivé divinities he was of 
necessity a god-of-all-work; a primitive community cannot afford 
to departmentalize its gods. The local hero had to help his 
family to fight, to secure fertility for their crops and for them- 
selves, act as oracle when the community was perplexed, be ready 
for any emergency that might arise, and even on occasion he 
must mend a broken jug. But most of all he was adored as 
a Healer. As a Healer he rises very nearly to the rank of an 
Olympian, but through the gentleness of his office he keeps a 
certain humanity that prevents complete deification. A typical 
instance of the Hero-Healer is the god Asklepios. 


We conceive of Asklepios as he is figured in many a Greek 
and Graeco-Roman statue, a reverend bearded god, somewhat of 


1 West African Studies, p. 132. - 2 Ar. Tagenist. frg. 1. 


342 The Making of a God [ CH. 


the type of Zeus, but characterized by the staff on which he leans 
and about which is twined a snake. The snake, our hand-books 
tell us, is the ‘symbol of the healing art,’ and hence the attribute 
of Asklepios, god of medicine. 

The design in fig. 101, from a votive relief? found in the 
Asklepieion and now in the National Museum at Athens, gives 





Fic. 101. 


cause for reflection. The god himself stands in his familiar 
attitude, waiting the family of worshippers who approach with 
offerings. A little happy honoured boy is allowed to lead the 
procession bringing a sheep to the altar. Behind the god is 
his attribute, a huge coiled snake, his head erect and level with the 
god he is. Take away the human Asklepios and the scene is yet 
complete, complete as on the Meilichios relief in fig. 2, the great 
hero snake and his worshippers. 


1 Cat. 1407, from a photograph. For permission to publish this relief and those 
in figs. 102, 105, 106, my grateful thanks are due to Mr Kabbadios, Ephor of Anti- 
quities at Athens. 


Vit] Asklepios 343 


The relief in fig. 101 is under a foot in length, the offering 
probably of some poor man who clung to his old faith in the 
healing snake-hero. It forces us in its plain-spoken simplicity 
to face just the fact that the dedicator of the next relief’ 
(fig. 102) is so anxious to conceal. This second relief is the 








Fre. 102. 


offering of a rich man, the figures are about half life-size; it was 
found in the same Asklepieion on the S. slope of the Acropolis. 
Asklepios no longer stands citizen-fashion leaning on his staff: he 
is seated in splendour, and beside him is coiled a very humble 
attributive snake. Behind are two figures, probably of a son and 
a daughter, and they all three occupy a separate chapel aloof from 
their human worshippers. 

In token of his humble birth as the ghost of a mortal the snake 
always clings to Asklepios, but it is not the only evidence. An 
essential part of his healing ritual was always and everywhere the 
éycoiunors, the ‘sleeping in’ his sanctuary. The patient who 
came to be cured must sleep and in a dream the god either 
healed him or revealed the means of healing. It was the dream 

1 Cat. 1377, from a photograph. 


2 For the whole subject of éyxoiuno.s see L. Deubner, De Incubatione capitula 
duo. 


344 The Making of a God [ cH. 


oracle sent by Earth herself’ that Apollo the Olympian came to 
supersede. All the strange web of human chicanery that was 
woven round the dream cure it would here be irrelevant to 


examine: only the simple fact need be noted that the prescribed— 


ritual of sleep was merely a survival of the old dream oracle of 
the hero. It was nowise peculiar to Asklepios. When men came 
to the beautiful little sanctuary of Amphiaraos’ at Oropus they 
purified themselves, sacrificed a ram, and spreading the skin 
under them they went to sleep ‘awaiting a revelation in a 
dream.’ 


- The dream oracle remained always proper to the earth-born 


heroes; we hear of no one sleeping in the precinct of Zeus, or of 
Apollo, and the belief in the magic of sleep long outlasted the 
service of the Olympians. To-day year by year on the festival of 
the Panagia a throng of sick from the islands round about make 
their pilgrimage to Tenos, and the sick sleep in the Church and in 
the precinct and are healed, and in the morning is published the 
long list of miraculous cures (@avyata). It is only the truth and 
the true gods that lived. The Panagia has taken to herself all 
that was real in ancient faith, in her are still incarnate the 
Mother and the Maid and Asklepios the Saviour. \\ Like most 
primitive faiths the belief in the dream cure appealed to some- 
thing very deep-down and real, however misunderstood and per- 
verted, something in the secret bidding of nature that said, that 
always will say: 
‘Sleep Heart, a little free 
From thoughts that kill. 
Nothing now hard to thee 
Or good or ill. 
And when the shut eyes see 
Sleep’s mansions fill, 
Night might bring that to be 
Day never will.’ 

The worship of Asklepios, we know from the evidence of an 
inscription’, was introduced at Athens about 421 B.c.: it was still 
no doubt something of a new excitement when Aristophanes 
wrote his Plutus. But Athens was not left till 421 B.c. without 
a Hero-Healer. Asklepios came to Athens as a full-blown god, 

1 Eur. Iph. in T. 1261. a/Pimad. De 


8 A, Mitt. 1893, p. 250. The introduction of the healer of Epidauros may have 
been connected with the great plague at Athens. 


~ 


if elleg ——" _ iy 


vit] Amynos and Dexion 345 


came first from Thessaly, where he was the rival of Apollo, and 
finally from his great sanctuary at Epidauros, and, when he came, we 
have definite evidence that his cult was superimposed on that of 
amore ancient hero. ‘Affiliated’ is perhaps the juster word, for 
when a hero from without took over the cult of an indigenous 
hero there is no clash of ritual as in the case of an Olympian, no 
conflict between Ouvcias and évayicpoi; both heroes alike are 
content with the simple offering of the pelanos. 


In the course of the ‘ Enneakrounos’ excavations Dr Dérpfeld 
came upon a small sanctuary consisting of a precinct, an altar, and 
a well’. The precinct wall, the well and the conduit leading to it 
were clearly, from the style of their masonry, of the date of 
Peisistratos. Within and around the precinct were votive offerings 
that pointed to the worship of a god of healing, reliefs repre- 
senting parts of the human body, breasts and the like, a man 
holding a huge leg marked with a varicose vein, reliefs of the 
usual ‘ Asklepios’ type, and above all votive snakes. Had there 
been no inscriptions the precinct could have been at once claimed 
as ‘sacred to Asklepios, and we should have been left with the 
curious problems, ‘Why had Asklepios two precincts, one on the 
south, one on the west of the Akropolis; and, if the god had 
already a shrine on the west slope in the days of Peisistratos, why 
' did he trouble to make a triumphant entry into Athens on the 
south slope in 421 B.c. ?’ 

Happily we are left in no such dilemma. On a stele found in 
the precinct we have the following inscription®: ‘Mnesiptolemé on 
behalf of Dikaiophanes dedicated (this) to Asklepios Amynos.’ 
If the inscription stood alone, we should probably decide that 
Asklepios was worshipped in the precinct under the title of 
Amynos, the Protector. Whatever the original meaning of the 
word Asklepios—and we may conjecture it was merely a cultus- 
titlk—it soon became a proper name, and could therefore easily 
be associated with an adjectival epithet. 

A second inscription® happily makes it certain that Amynos 
was not merely ‘an adjective, but an adjectival title of a person 


1 A. Koerte, ‘Bezirk eines Heilgottes,’ A. Mitt. 1893, p. 237, and 1896, p. 311. 

2 Koerte, op. cit. Mvnourrodéun irép Acxatopdvous ’AckAnTig Apivy avébnke. 

3 Koerte, op. cit. dvdpes Sika yelyov\ace mepl TA Kowa Tw dpyedvuw Tod ’Audtyou 
kal tod “Ack\ntlov Kal Tod Acégiovos émawéoat KTK. 


346 The Making of a God [CH. 


distinct from Asklepios. It runs as follows: ‘Certain citizens 
held it just to commemorate concerning the common weal of the 
members of the thiasos of Amynos and of Asklepios and of Dexion.’ 
Here we have the names of three personalities manifestly separate 
and enumerated in significant order. We know Asklepios and 
most fortunately Dexion. The author of the Htymologicon 
Magnum’, in explaining the word Dewion, says: ‘The title was 
given by the Athenians to Sophocles after his death. They say 
that when Sophocles was dead the Athenians, wishing to give 
him added honours, built him a hero-shrine and named him 
Dexion, the Receiver, from his reception of Asklepios—for he 
received the god in his own house and set up an altar to him,’ 
For the heroization of Sophocles we have earlier evidence than 
the Htymologicon Magnum. The historian Istros” (3rd cent. B.C.) 
is quoted as saying that the Athenians ‘on account of the man’s 
virtue passed a vote that yearly sacrifice should be made to him.’ 

It seems an extraordinary story, but, if we do not press too 
hard the words of the panegyrist, the explanation is natural | 
enough. Sophocles was not exactly canonised ‘because of his 
virtue.’ He became a hero, officially, because he had officially 
received Asklepios, and the ‘ Receiver’ of a god, like the ‘Founder’ 
of a town, had a right to ritual recognition. ‘Dexion’ is the 
Receiver of the god, and from the fact that the inscription with 
his name is set up in the little precinct on the west slope of 
the Acropolis we may be sure his worship went on there. It was 
in that little precinct, we may conjecture, that he served as priest. 
This conjecture is made almost certain by the fact that a later 
inscription® (1st cent. B.c.), with a dedication to Amynos and 
Asklepios, is dated by the priesthood of a ‘Sophocles,’ probably a 
descendant of the poet. Sophocles as a-hero was not a success, 
probably he was too alive and human as a poet; he was in his 
own precinct completely submerged by the god he ‘received.’ 

The theological history of the little precinct is quite clear. 
The inscription preserves the ritual order of precedence. The 
sanctuary began, not later than Peisistratos, as an Amyneion, 
shrine of.a local hero worshipped under the title of Amynos, 


1 Ktym. Mag. s.v. Ackiwv. It seems possible that by the olxéa in which Sophocles 
received Asklepios is meant the Amyneion. 

* Istr. fre. 51. 

3 Koerte, op. cit. éml lepéws Lopoxdous Tod Piwrov. 


vit] Herakles 347 


Protector. At some time, probably owing to the recent pestilence 
which the local hero had failed to avert, it was thought well to 
affiliate a Healer-god who had attained enormous prestige in 
the Peloponnesus. The experiment was quietly and carefully 
tried in the little Amyneion before the foundation of the great 
Asklepieion on the south slope. It was a very simple matter. 
A sacred snake would be sent for’ from Epidauros, to join the 
local snake of Amynos. Both were snakes, both were healers; 
the same offerings served for both, the votive limbs, the pelanoz. 
Sophocles the human Receiver, who had introduced Asklepios in 
due course, naturally enough dies, and a third healing hero is 
added to the list. Dexion fades, and Asklepios gradually effaces 
Amynos and takes his name as a ceremonial title. 


Because Athens alone is really alive to us, because we know 
Sophocles as human poet, Asklepios as divine Healer, the case of 
Amynos, Asklepios, Sophocles seems specially vital and convincing. 
But we must take it only as one instance of the ladder from 
earth to heaven that had its lowest rungs planted in every village 
scattered over Greece—a ladder that reached sometimes, but not 
always or even often, up to high Olympus itself’ Whether a 
local hero became a god depended on a multitude of chances and 
conditions, the clue to which is lost. If a local hero became 
famous beyond his own parish the Olympian religion made every 
effort to meet him half-way. Herakles was of the primitive 
Pelasgian’ stock. His name, if the most recent etymology® be 
accepted, means only the young dear Hero—the Hero par ea- 
cellence. No pains were spared to affiliate him. He is allowed 
the Olympian burnt sacrifice*, he is passed through the folds of 
Hera’s robe to make him her child by adoption’, he is married in 
Olympus to Hebe, herself but newly translated, the vase-painter® 


Cie vir 8, 4-1. LOL 3a. 23, 7. 

2 Prof. Ridgeway, The Early Age. of Greece, vol. 1. p. 640. 

3 Usener, Die Sinflutsagen, p. 58, draws attention to the hypocoristic form 
"Hpvxados, see Hesych. s.v. rév ‘Hpaxdéa LHpPpwv troxopitixds, and supposes an old 
Greek diminutive xa\os=Lat. culus, homunculus, Herculus. 

4 See p. 12. 

5 Diod. Sic. tv. 40 rv “Hpay dvaBaoav émi kNivny kal Tov “Hpaxdéa mpochuBouervny 
mpos TO cGua dia Tv évduudtwy adeivar mpos Ti Viv pimouuevny THY adnOwny yéverw" 
érrep wéxpt TOO viv Trovety Tovs BapBdpous Gray Berov vidy Totetc Bar BovAwyTat. 


® Rosch. Lex. s.v. Herakles, ‘Apotheose,’ p. 2239. 


348 The Making of a God [ CH. 


diligently paints his reception into Olympus, he is always 
elaborately entering, yet he is never really in, he is too much 
a man to wear at ease the livery of an Olympian, and literature, 
always over-Olympianized, makes him too often the laughing- 
stock of the stage. 















TUT 


Ce 





Ue 






mV 


Fia. 103. 


More often it is the fate of a hero to become locally a divinity 
of healing, but never to emerge as a Pan-Hellenic god. In the 


vit] The Hero-Healers 349 


design in fig. 103 we have a good instance—from a vase! found in 
Boeotia and now in the National Museum at Athens. On the 
obverse a bearded man, wearing a wreath, reclines at a banquet. 
A table with cakes stands by his couch. An enormous coiled snake 
is about to drink from the wine-cup in his hand. On the reverse 
a woman-goddess holding a sceptre is seated, a girl brings offerings 
—an oinochoé, cakes, a lighted taper. Above are hung votive 
offerings—a hand, two legs, such as hang in the shrines of saints 
in Brittany and Italy to-day. An interpreter unversed in the 
complexity of hero-cults would at once name the god with the 
snake on the obverse Asklepios, the goddess with the votive limbs 
on the reverse Hygieia; but to these names they have no sort of 
right. Found as the vase was in Boeotia, the vase-painter more 
probably intended Amphiaraos, or possibly Trophonios, and Agathe 
Tyche. All we can say is that they are a couple of healing 
divinities—hero and heroine divinized. 

The vase is of late style, and the artist has forgotten that the 
snake is the hero; he makes him a sort of tame attributive pet, 
feeding out of the 
wine-cup. The snake 
is not bearded, but he 
has a touch of human 
unreality in that he is 
about to drink out of 
the wine-cup. These 
humanized snakes are 
fed with human food ; 
their natural food 
would be a live bird 
or arabbit. Dr Gadow 
kindly tells me that 
a snake will lap milk, 
but if he is to eat 
his sacrificial food, the 
pelanos, it must be Fic. 104. 
made exceedingly thin ; 
anything of the nature of a cake or even porridge he could not 
swallow. And yet the snake on the Acropolis had for his monthly 










































SSE Maas 








1 ’Eg@nuepis “Apx- 1890, Pl. viz. 


350 The Making of a God [ CH. 


due a ‘honey cake, and at Lebadeia’ in the shrine of Trophonios, 
where it was a snake who gave oracles, the inhabitants of the 
country ‘cast into his shrine flat cakes steeped in honey.’ 
Representations.of the hero reclining at a feast occur very 
frequently on votive reliefs of a class shortly to be discussed. They 
appear very rarely on vases and only on those of late style. A good 
instance is the design in fig. 104 from a late red-figured krater 
in the Berlin Museum* The attempt to give a name to the 
recumbent man is quite fruitless: the great snake marks him as 
a dead hero. The woman and boy can scarcely be said to be 
worshippers, though the boy brings cakes and fruit; it is rather 
the feast that went on in life figured as continuing after death. 


It remains to examine some of the class of votive reliefs closely 
analogous to the vase-painting in fig. 104, reliefs usually known 
as ‘ Hero-Feasts’ or ‘Funeral Banquets. They are monuments 
especially instructive for our purpose, because nowhere else is 
seen so clearly the transition from hero to god, and also the 
gradual superposition of the Olympians over local hero-cults. 


THE ‘ HERO-FRASTs.’ 


Plato* in the Laws arranges the objects of divine worship in a 
regular sequence: first the Olympian gods together with those who 
keep the city; second the underworld gods whose share are things of 
unlucky omen; third the daemons whose worship is characterized 


as ‘orgiastic’; fourth the heroes; fifth ancestral gods. He concludes 


the list with living parents to whom much honour should be 
offered. As early as Hesiod‘ theology attempted some differentia- 
tion between heroes and daemons; daemons being accounted divine 
in some higher sense. Of all this minute departmentalism ritual 


1 Schol. ad Ar. Nub. 508 év AcBadeia iepov éori Tpopwviov dou dqus fv 6 wavrevd- 
Hevos @ ol KaTotkodytes mAaKobvvyTas EBaddNov méAcTe Sedevouévous. The women in the 
fourth Mime of Herondas (v. 90) offer a pelanos to the snake of Asklepios. 

* Berl. Cat. 3155. Jahrb. d. Inst., Anzeiger, 1890, p. 89. 

* Plat. Legg. 7174. The Olympian gods do not here concern us, but it may be 
worth noting that the gods who keep the state rods ryv rédw Exovras Oeo’s, Who are 
classed with the Olympians as of the first rank, seem to correspond with the 
doruvdpuot and ayopaco of Aeschylus (Ag. 90) who take rank with the ovpdvia. Some 
gods wherever found were Olympian, e.g. Zeus and Apollo; others though not Pan- 
Hellenically recognised took rank as such locally, e.g. Demeter. 

4 Hes. Erg. 109. 


vu] The ‘ Hero-Feasts’ 351 


knows nothing. The only recognized distinction is that burnt 
offerings are the meed of the Olympians, offerings devoted (éva- 
ytopoi) of the chthonic gods. Between the chthonic gods and 
the whole class of dead men, heroes and daemons, the only 
distinction observed is, as already noted, that certain chthonic 
gods from sheer conservatism reject the service of wine, whereas 
it is apparently acceptable to dead men, to heroes and to daemons 
not fully divinized. 

In hike fashion votive reliefs of the type known as Hero- 
Feasts draw no distinction between hero and daemon, nor indeed 
do they clearly distinguish between ordinary dead man and hero. 
As a rule the ‘Hero-Feasts’ are depicted on reliefs set up in 
sanctuaries rather than graveyards, but they occur sometimes on 
actual tombstones" set up in actual cemeteries. 

The ‘ Hero-Feast’ is found broadcast over Attica, the Pelopon- 





Fic. 105. 


nese and the islands; there is scarcely a local museum that does 
not contain specimens. The design in fig. 105 is from a relief in 
1 There are several instances in the National Museum at Athens and ‘ Hero- 


Feasts’ have been carved on sarcophagi which are still in the courtyard of the local 
museum at Paros. 


352 The Making of a God [ CH. . 


the local museum at Samos’. Three heroes are lying at the 
banquet; one holds a large rhyton. A snake coiled about a tree 
is about to drink from it. Snake and tree mark a sanctuary, 
otherwise the scene is very homelike and non-hieratic. Of the 
inscription only two letters remain, and they tell nothing. The 
round shield and the horse’s head and the dog tell us we have 
to do with actual heroes, but who they were it is impossible 
to say. 

The relief in fig. 106 is also from Samos*. It is of the usual 





aT, 
Z} SEA 
Algp oi w IRS SHPOINHA TR = 


Fie. 106. 


type—the recumbent man, the seated woman, the boy about to 
draw wine. The field is full of characteristic tokens; for the 
man, the horse’s head, the cuirass, helm, shield and greaves; for 
the woman, the work-basket of the shape so often occurring on 


1 Inv. 55, see Dr Wiegand, ‘Antike Sculpturen in Samos,’ A. Mitt. 1900, p. 176. 
2 Inv. 60. 


vir] The ‘ Hero-Feasts’ 353 


Athenian grave-reliefs, and, it may be, the tame bird which stands 
on the casket pecking at a fruit. The snake is for both, for both 
are dead. The inscription at first surprises us; it is as follows: 
‘Lais daughter of Phoenix, heroine, hail.’ There is no mention of 
the hero, but on examination of the stone it is seen that a 
previous inscription has been erased’. Some one cared more for 
Lais than for her husband, hence the palimpsest. 

These two specimens from Samos have been selected out of 
countless others because in them it is quite certain that heroized 
mortals are represented. The earliest specimens of the ‘ Hero- 
Feast’ discovered had no inscriptions, and though horse and 
snake were present an attempt was made to interpret them as 
sacred to Asklepios; the snake was ‘the symbol of healing, the 
horse that mysterious creature the ‘horse of Hades®’ The most 
ardent devotee of symbolic interpretation can scarcely make 
mythology out of the greaves and the work-basket. 


Reliefs of the ‘ Hero-Feast’ type are all of late date. The 
earliest one is doubtfully assigned to the end of the 5th century ; 
the great majority are much later. The reason is not far to seek. 
In the fine period of Greek Art, the period to which we owe most 
of the grave-reliefs found at Athens, hero-worship is submerged. 
It is a time of rationalism, and the funeral monuments of that 
time tend to represent this life rather than the next. I have 
tried elsewhere to show that early Attic grave-reliefs are cast in 
the type of the Sparta hero-reliefs, but nowhere in Attic grave- 
reliefs of the 5th century do we find the dead heroized. But once 
the age of reason past, hero-worship re-emerged, and it would 
seem in greater force than before. 

In the fine period of art hero-reliefs do exist, but not as 
funeral monuments. One of the earliest and finest® we possess 
is represented in fig. 107. It is not at all of the same type as 
the ‘Hero-Feast,’ and is figured here partly for its beauty and 
interest, partly to mark the contrast. A hero occupies the central 
place, leading his horse, followed by his hound. That he is a 


1 See Dr Wiegand, op. cit. p. 180. 

* See Dr Verrall, ‘Death and the Horse,’ J.H.S., xvi. 1898, p. 1. 

3 Roscher, s.v. Heros, p. 2559, No. 5. A better reproduction in phototype has 
been published by Dr Chr. Blinkenberg, ‘Et Attisk WVotivrelief, Festskrift til 
J. L. Ussing, Kopenhagen, 1900. I follow Dr Ussing’s view (kindly translated for 
me by Dr Martin Nilsson). 


H. 23 


354 The Making of a God [CH. 


hero we are sure, for in front of him is his low, omphalos-like 
altar, and to the left a worshipper approaches. Unhappily there 





Fie. 107. 


is no inscription, but yet we are tempted to give the hero a 
name. 

Horse and horseman are set against a rocky background. The 
marble of which the relief is made is Pentelic, the style Attic, with 
many reminiscences of the Parthenon marbles. It is therefore not 
too bold to see in the rocky background a slope of the Acropolis. 
To. the right above the hero is a seated figure, with only the lower 
part of the body draped. Zeus is so represented and Asklepios. 
Zeus has no shrine in the slopes of the Acropolis, nor is it 
probable he would be depicted on a relief of this date seated 
in casual fashion as a spectator. The figure is almost certainly 
Asklepios. Given that the figure is Asklepios, the narrative of 
Pausanias! supplies the clue to the remaining figures. ‘Approach- 
ing the Acropolis by this road, next after the sanctuary of 
Asklepios is the temple of Themis, and in front of this temple 
is a mound upreared as a monument to Hippolytos. Then 
Pausanias tells the story of Phaedra and Hippolytos; he does 
not actually mention the sanctuary of Aphrodite, but he says 
‘the old images were not there in my time, but those I saw were 
the work of no obscure artists.’ Images of course presuppose 
a sanctuary, and such a sanctuary we now know from inscriptions 


1 P, 1. 22. 1—3, see Dr Frazer ad loc., and Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 328. 


vo | Hippolytos B55 


and votive offerings found on the spot to have existed, and that it 
was dedicated to Aphrodite Pandemos. The figures on the relief 
exactly correspond to the account of Pausanias. To the right, 
Le. to the East, the figure of Asklepios; next Themis with her 
temple, clearly indicated by the two columns between which she 
stands; immediately in front of her Hippolytos with his sacred 
altar-mound. Above it Aphrodite, literally ‘over Hippolytos’ 
(ImmodvT@ 8 éc). It is as Euripides’ knew it: 

‘And Phaedra then, his father’s Queen high born, 

Saw him, and as she saw her heart was torn 

With great love by the working of my will. 

And there, when he was gone, on Pallas’ hill 

Deep in the rock, that Love no more might roam, 

She built a shrine and named it Love-at-Home. 


And the rock held it, but its face always 
Seeks Trozen o’er the seas.’ 


It is worth noting that the relief, now in the Torlonia Museum 
at Rome, was found not far from Aricia, where the hero Virbius, 
the Latin equivalent of Hippolytos, was worshipped. 

It is possible that in the tragedy of the wrath of Aphrodite 
against the hero who worshipped Artemis, and in the title of the 
goddess ‘over Hippolytos,’ later misunderstood as ‘because of, 
‘for the sake of’ Hippolytos, we have a reminiscence of a super- 
position of cults—that the actual contest was between a local 
hero and Aphrodite who had waxed to the glory of an Olympian. 
Such a view can however scarcely be deduced from the relief 
in question, which seems to present relations merely topogra- 
phical and perfectly peaceful. 


The design in fig. 108, from a relief in the Jacobsen’ collection 
at Ny Carlsberg, Copenhagen, shows a clearer case of super- 
session. The design is not earlier than the 4th century B.c. and of 
the usual type of ‘ Hero-Feast’; we have the reclining man, seated 
wife, attendant cupbearer, and, to make the scene quite complete, 


1 Kur. Hipp. 26 ffi., trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. For Aphrodite Endemos, 
Love-at-Home, see Dr Verrall, Cl. Rev., Dec. 1901, p. 449. Dr Svoronos makes the 
interesting suggestion that the sanctuary founded by Phaedra may have been on 
the site later occupied by the temple of Nike Apteros, and that the Wingless Victory 
may have been a title rather of Aphrodite than the Athene. See Journal Inter- 
national d Archéologie, 1901, p. 459. 

2 Cat. 95, published and fully discussed by Prof. Furtwangler, ‘Ein sogenanntes 
Todtenmahlrelief mit Inschrift,’ Sitzwngsberichte d. k. Bay. Ak. d. Wissenschaften, 
Philos.-Philolog. Klasse 1897, p. 401. 


23—2 


356 The Making of a God [ CH. 


three worshippers of smaller size. The procession of worshippers 
is a frequent, though not uniform, element in the reliefs repre- 
senting ‘Hero-Feasts. When present they serve to show very 
clearly that the hero and his wife are objects of worship. As a 


APtTOMAXH  OEMPIZ: ANEGE RANSIIERITE AEIM $1410; KAITHIMAAT PIT O YEON @IATAl 


AX § 
“GAYMIPOsaPosg . KAITYX ItACAOHITOYOEOYLCY WaAiLYy 





Fie. 108. 


rule it is, we have seen, safest not to name the hero. In the 
cases so far where he or the heroine is inscribed, the name has 
been that of a mortal. In the present case the inscription has a 
surprise in store for us. Assuredly no one, without the inscrip- 
tions, would have ventured to conjecture the imscribed names. 
The inscription runs as follows: 


‘ Aristomache and Theoris dedicated (it) to Zeus Epiteleios Philios, and 
to Philia the mother of the god, and to Tyche Agathe the wife of the god, 


Philia, the Friendly One, is mother not wife of Zeus Philios, 
‘Zeus the Friendly’; it is the old matriarchal relation of Mother 
and Son (p. 273). But the dedicators, wedded themselves no doubt 
after patriarchal fashion, seem to feel aneed that Zeus Philios should 
be married; they give him not his natural shadow-wife Phiha 


but Tyche Agathe, ‘Good 








she has been used up as mother 


wir Zeus Philios B57 


Fortune. In the procession of worshippers there are two women 

_ with a man between them: probably they are his mother and wife 
and wish to see their relation to him mirrored in their dedication. 
But they are content with the traditional type of Hero-Feasts, 
possibly the only type that the conservative workman kept in 
stock in his workshop. 

It is worth noting that this interesting relief came from a 
precinct of Asklepios in Munychia down at the Peiraeus, the 
same precinct which yielded the snake reliefs (figs. 1 and 2) dedi- 
cated to Meilichios. There were also found the relief in fig. 4, 
several reliefs adorned with snakes only, some reliefs representing 
Asklepios, and various ritual inscriptions. The precinct seems to 
have become a sort of melting-pot of gods and heroes. Tyche 
we know at Lebadeia as the wife of the Agathos Daimon, the 
Good or Rich Spirit, and it is curious to note that Zeus on the 
relief holds a cornucopia, symbol of plenty. His other title Hpi- 
teleios points the same way. Hesychius* tells us that the word 
émiTeXelwous means the same as avénous, ‘increase,’ and Plato” 
gives the name ézruTeAXetw@oecs, ‘accomplishments, to family feasts 
held in thanksgiving for the birth and welfare of children. 

It seems obvious that the precinct once belonged to a hero, 
worshipped under the form of a snake, and as Meilichios, god of the 
wealth of the underworld—a sort of Agathos Daimon or Good 
Spirit. He must have had two other titles—Epiteleios, the 
Accomplished, and Philios, the Friendly One. At some time or 
other Asklepios took over the shrine of Meilichios, Philios, Epite- 
leios, as he took over the shrine of Amynos, but Zeus also put in 
a claim and the two divided the honours of the place. The old 
snake-hero was forgotten, overshadowed by the Olympian and the 
great immigrant healer; but the Olympian does not wholly triumph. 
He cannot change the local ritual, and he must consent to a 
certain interchange of attributes. 

This is quaintly shown in the two reliefs placed side by side 
in fig. 109%. The larger one to the left shows a seated god holding 
a cornucopia; beneath his chair is an eagle. In deference to this 

1 Hesych, s.v. 2 Plat. Legg. vi. 784d. 

3 Both reliefs are reproduced from photographs kindly given me by the German 
Archaeological Institute. The relief to Zeus Philios was found near the Hill of the 


Nymphs at Athens (C.I.A. 1. 1330), that to the Agathos Daimon at Thespiae 
(C.I.A. 1. 1815). 


358 The Making of a God (cm: * 


characteristically Olympian bird we should expect the dedication 
to be to Zeus. We find it is to the ‘Good Spirit.’ In the smaller 





EPAMETAIAII 
ely Eta 
OELANES 






Fie. 109. 


relief a similar bird is perched below the chair, and a humble pig 
is the sacrifice, as it is to Zeus Meilichios; the inscription tells us 
that ‘the Club-men dedicated it to Zeus Philos in the archonship 
of Hegesios.’ The relief is dated by this archonship as set up in 
the year 324/3B.c. The Friendly Zeus was the god of good fellow- 
ship and was of wide popularity’. To cheerful, hilarious souls it 
was comforting to think that there was another Zeus, less remote, 


1 y} Tov Pidvoy was a popular oath, cf. Ar. Acharn. 730. The omission of the 
proper name is significant. 


* vir]. Zeus Philios 359 


more of the cornucopia and less of the thunderbolt, and that he 
was ready to join a human feast. The diner-ont needs and finds 
a god in his own image, and Zeus—Zeus with his title of Philios, 
accustomed as he was to Homeric banquets, was ready for the post. 
So the comic parasite reasons!: 
‘I wish to explain clearly 

What a holy orthodox business this dining-out is— 

An invention of the gods; the other arts 

Were invented by men of talent, not by the gods. 

But dining-out was invented by Zeus the Friendly, 

By common consent the greatest of all the gods. 

Now good old Zeus comes straight into people’s houses 

In his free and easy way, rich and poor alike. 

‘Wherever he sees a comfortable couch set out 

And by its side a table properly laid, 

Down he sits to a regular dinner with courses, 

Wine and dessert and all, and then off he goes 

Straight back home, and he never pays his shot.’ 

The fooling is obviously based on ritual practice in the ‘ Hero- 

Feast’ that developed into the Feasts of the Gods, the Theo- 


xenla. 


Our argument ends where it began—with Zeus Meilichios, an 
early chthonic stratum of worship, a later Olympian supersession., 
The two religions, alien in ritual, alien in significance, never more 
than mechanically fused. We have also seen that the new religion 
was powerless to alter the old save in name; the Diasia becomes 
the festival of Zeus, the ritual is a holocaust offered to a snake; 
Apollo and Artemis take over the Thargelia, but it remains a 
savage ceremony of magical purification. 

It might seem that we had reached the end. In reality, for 
religion in any deep and mystical sense, we have yet to watch the 
beginning ; we have yet to see the coming of a god, who came from 
the North and yet was no Achaean, no Olympian, who belonging 
to the ancient stock revived the ancient ritual, the sacrifice that 
was in its inner content a sacrifice of purification, but revived 
it with a significance all his own, the god who took over the 
ritual of the Anthesteria, Dionysos. 


1 Diod. Sinop. frg. ap. Athen. v1. 2396. Meineke, F.C.G. 11. p. 543. 


360 The Making of a God [ CH. 


Dionysos ON HERO-RELIEFS. 


The passing from the old to the new is very curiously and 
instructively shown in the two designs in figs. 110 and 111. The 
design in fig. 110 is from a relief found in the harbour of Peiraeus 
and now in the National Museum at Athens. The material is 
Pentelic marble ; in places the surface has suffered considerably 
from the corrosion of sea-water. The fine style of the relief 
dates it as probably belonging to the end of 5th century B.C. 

The general type of the relief is of course the same as that 
of the ‘Hero-Feast?” A youth on a couch holds a rhyton, the 





Fie. 110. 


usual woman is seated at his feet, the usual procession stands 
to the left. But it is a ‘Hero-Feast’ with a difference. The 
group of ‘worshippers’ are not worshippers; they are talking 
among themselves, they hold not victims or other offerings, but 
the implements of the drama—a mask, a tambourine. This is 


1 Gat. 1500. Both designs in figs. 110 and 111 are reproduced from photographs. 

2 The most recent account of this much discussed relief is by Dr Studniczka, 
‘Ueber das Schauspielerrelief aus dem Peiraeus,’ in Mélanges Perrot, p. 307. The 
relief was first published A. Mittheilungen 1882, Taf. 14, p. 389: see also Hermes 
1887, p. 336. A. Mitt. 1888, p. 221. Reisch, Weihgeschenke, p. 23. Jahrbuch 
d. Inst. 1896, p. 104. A. Mitt. 1896, p. 362. 


vit] Dionysos on Hero-reliefs 361 


clearly seen in the case of the middle figure, a woman’, The 
worshippers are tragic actors. This prepares us for the fact 
disclosed by the inscriptions beneath the figures of the youth and 
the attendant woman. Under the youth is written quite clearly 
Dionysos: under the woman was an inscription of which only two 
certain letters remain, the two last, va. These inscriptions, it 
should clearly be noted, are later than the relief itself, probably 
not earlier than 300 B.c. The name of the woman attendant 
cannot certainly be made out: the most probable conjecture is 
(Paid)ia, Play, a natural enough name for a nymph attendant on 
Dionysos. 

The name of the god is certain, and, though the inscription is 
an afterthought, it certainly voices the intention of the original 
artist. It is to the honour of Dionysos, not to that of a hero, that 
the actors with their masks assemble—to his honour rather than 
to his definite worship. But none the less there remains the 
significant fact that the god has taken over the art-type of the 
‘ Hero-Feast.’ 

’ The second relief* im fig. 111 tells im slightly different’ and 
more elaborate form the same tale. The design is from a relief 
in the Museum at Naples, and is an instance of a type long 
known as the ‘Ikarios reliefs.’ Its style dates it as about the 
2nd cent. B.c. It clearly presents a blend of the ‘ Hero-Feast’ to 
the left and the triumphal entry of Dionysos, drunken, elderly, 
attended by a train of worshippers to the right. The immigrant 
god is received by the local hero. What local hero receives him 
we cannot say. Legend tells of such receptions by Ikarios, by 
Pegasos, by Amphictyon, by Semachos. The hero must remain 
unnamed; anyhow he plays to Dionysos the part played by 
Sophocles, he is Dexion, Receiver, Host. It is a Theoxenia, a 
feasting of the god. The ‘Ikarios’ reliefs are late, and, in the 


1 Dr Studniezka (op. cit. supra) has made a very close examination of the 
objects held, and attempts, I do not think successfully, to deduce therefrom the 
dramatic characters impersonated. The object held by the last figure to the left 
as well as his face is obliterated. It is sufficient for our purpose that it is clear 
from the middle figure they are actors. 

2 From a photograph. There are similar reliefs not quite so well preserved in 
the Louvre and in the British Museum (Cat. 176). A complete list of those extant 
is given by Hauser, Die Neu-attischen Reliefs, Anhang, p. 189. The earliest specimen, 
more nearly approaching the ‘Hero-Relief,’ and so marked by the presence of 
a snake, is published Arch. Zeit. 1882, Taf. x1v., and I have already discussed it, 
Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. xlv, fig. 7. 


362 The Making of a God [ CH. 


euphemistic manner of the time, the representation is all peace 
and harmony. The hero, be he who he may, receives in awe and 
reverence and gladness the incoming divine guest. But Herodotus 
tells another tale—a tale of the forcible wresting of the honours 





Ihe: ial. 


of the hero to the glory of the god. In telling the early history 
of Sekyon under the tyrant Cleisthenes he’ makes this notable 
statement: ‘The inhabitants of Sekyon paid other honours to 
Adrastos and they celebrated his misfortunes by tragic choruses, 
for at that time they did not honour Dionysos, but honoured 
Adrastos. Now Cleisthenes transferred these choruses - (from 
Adrastos) to Dionysos, but the rest of the sacrifice he gave to 
Melanippos. It is a sudden glimpse into a very human state of 
affairs. To put down the cult of Adrastos, the hero of a family 
alien to his own, Cleisthenes introduced the worship of a Theban 
hero Melanippos. He dared not for some reason give the tragic ~ 
choruses to Melanippos; rather than the local enemy should 
still have them he hands them over to a popular immigrant god, 
Dionysos. 

The recumbent hero in the ‘ Hero-Feasts’ is usually repre- 


1 Herod. v. 67. I owe this important reference to the article Heros in Roscher’s 
Lexicon, p. 2492, but Dr Deneken calls no attention to its significance in relation 
to Dionysos. 


~ 


eeu 


vir] Dionysos on Hero-reliefs 363 


sented as reclining at a feast and as drinking from a large wine- 
cup, attended by a cupbearer. It 
may be conjectured that this type, 
which does not appear till late in 
the 5th century, came in with the 
worship of Dionysos. The idea 
of future bliss as an ‘eternal 
drunkenness’ came, it will later be 
seen (Chap. X1.), with the religion of 
Dionysos from the North. By an- 
ticipation we may note a curious 
fact. On the late Roman coins of the 
Bizuae?, a Thracian tribe, the type 
of the Hero-Feast occurs. An in- 
stance is given in fig. 112. A hero is represented—of that we are 
sure from the cuirass suspended on the tree, from the horse 
and from the snake—but a hero, I would conjecture, conceived 
of as transfigured into the feasting god, Dionysos himself. 

To.the examination in detail of the cult of Dionysos we must 
now turn. 





1 J.H.S. vy. p. 116. Prof. Percy Gardner explains the coin as belonging to 
Asklepios: my suggestion is made with the utmost diffidence as differing from 
so great an authority on numismatics. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


DIONYSOS. 


“G) MAKAP OcTIC eYAAl- 
MN TEAETAC BEWN 
eiA@c BIOTAN aricTeyel. 


So far the formula for Greek theology has been, ‘Man makes 
the gods in his own image.’ Mythological development has 
proceeded on lines perfectly normal, natural, intelligible. In so 
far as we understand humanity we can predicate divinity. The 
gods are found to be merely magnified men, on the whole perhaps 
better but with frequent lapses into worse, quot homines tot sen- 
tentiae, quot sententiae tot det. 

As man grew more civilized, his image, mirrored in the gods, 
' grew more beautiful and pari passu the worship he offered to 
these gods advanced from ‘aversion’ (a7otpo7m7) to ‘tendance’ 
(Oepareda). But all along we have been conscious that some- 
thing was lacking, that even these exquisite presentations of the 
Nymphs and the Graces, the Mother and the Daughter, are really 
rather human than divine, that their ritual, whether of ignorant 
and cruel ‘aversion’ or of genial ‘tendance,’ was scarcely in our 
sense religious. These perfect Olympians and even these gracious 
Earth-goddesses are not really Lords over man’s life who made 
them, they are not even ghosts to beckon and threaten, they are 
lovely dreams, they are playthings of his happy childhood, and 
when full-grown he comes to face realities, from kindly sentiment 
he lets them lie unburied in the lumber-room of his life. 

Just when Apollo, Artemis, Athene, nay even Zeus himself, 
were losing touch with life and reality, fading and dying of their 
own luminous perfection, there came into Greece a new religious 


CH. VIIT| Dionysos an Immigrant 365 


impulse, an impulse really religious, the mysticism that is em- 
bodied for us in the two names Dionysos and Orpheus. The 
object of the chapters that follow is to try and seize, with as 
much precision as may be, the gist of this mysticism. 

Dionysos is a difficult god to understand. In the end it is 
only the mystic who penetrates the secrets of mysticism. It is 
therefore to poets and philosophers that we must finally look for 
help, and even with this help each man is in the matter of 
mysticism peculiarly the measure of his own understanding. But 
this ultimate inevitable vagueness makes it the more imperative 
that the few certain truths that can be made out about the 
religion of Dionysos should be firmly established and plainly set 
forth. 


DIONYSOS AN IMMIGRANT THRACIAN. 


First it is certain beyond question that Dionysos was a late- 
comer into Greek religion, an immigrant god, and that he came 
from that home of spiritual impulse, the North. These three 
propositions are so intimately connected that they may con- 
veniently be dealt with together. 

In the face of a steady and almost uniform ancient tradition 
that Dionysos came from without, it might scarcely be necessary to 
emphasize this point but for a recent modern heresy. Anthro- 
pologists have lately recognized’, and rightly, that Dionysos is in 
one of his aspects a nature-god, a god who comes and goes with 
the seasons, who has like Demeter and Kore, like Adonis and - 
Osiris, his Epiphanies and his Recessions. They have rashly 
concluded that these undoubted appearances and disappearances 
adequately account for the tradition of his immigration, that he 
is merely a new-comer year by year, not a foreigner; that he is 
welcomed every spring, every harvest, every vintage, exorcised, 
expelled and slain in the death of each succeding winter. This 
error is beginning to filter into handbooks. 

A moment’s consideration shows that the actual legend points 
to the reverse conclusion. The god is first met with hostility, 

1 Mr A. G. Bather in an interesting article on ‘The Problem of the Bacchae’ 
(J.H.S. xtv. 1894, p. 263) concludes that the myths of the introduction of Dionysos 


‘do not find their origin in any introduction of the god from without, but in the 
yearly inbringing of the new statue.’ 


366 Dionysos [ CH. | 


exorcised and expelled, then by the compulsion of his might and 
magic at last welcomed. Demeter and Kore are season-goddesses, 
yet we have no legend of their forcible entry. Comparative an- 
thropology has done much for the understanding of Dionysos, but 
to tamper with the historical fact of his immigration is to darken 
counsel. 

Ancient tradition must be examined, and first as to the 
lateness of his coming. 


In Homer Dionysos is not yet an Olympian. On the 
Parthenon frieze he takes his place among the seated gods. 
Somewhere between the dates of Homer and Pheidias his entry 
was effected. The same is true of the indigenous Demeter, so 
that this argument alone is inadequate, but the fact must be 
noted. 

The earliest monument of art showing Dionysos as an actual 
denizen of Olympus is the curious design from an amphora’ now 
in the Berlin Museum. The scene depicted is the birth of Athene 





and all the divinities present are carefully and sometimes curiously 
inscribed. Zeus with his thunderbolt is seated on a splendid 
throne in the centre. Athene springs from his head. To the 
right are Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, and last of all Apollo. 
To the left Eileithyia, Hermes, Hephaestos, and last Dionysos 
holding his great wine cup. 

From the style of the inscriptions the design can scarcely date 
later than the early part of the sixth century. The position and 


» 
1 Berlin, Cat. 1704. Mon. d. Inst. 1873 vol. 1x. Pl. nv. W. Helbig, Annali 1873, 
p. 106. The curious inscriptions do not here concern us. 


ye: 


VII | Dionysos received into Olympus 367 


grouping of the different gods is noteworthy. Of course someone 
must stand on the outside, but Dionysos is markedly aloof from 
the main action. Hermes seems to come as messenger to the 
furthest verge of Olympus to tell him the news. At the right, 
the other Northerner, Apollo, occupies the last place. 
Moreover on vase-paintings substantially earlier than the 
Parthenon marbles the scene of his entry into Olympus is not 
infrequent. As we have no literary tradition of this entry, the 
evidence of vase-paintings is here of some importance. The 
design selected (fig. 114) is from a cylix signed by the potter 
Euxitheos! and can be securely dated as a work executed about 
the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.c. On the obverse is an 


Vig Weer 
+ ra 


° 





bh 


vane 
y v) sen ; 

y ‘ x x wh 
MES 


4 VA (eee IN N Ven) \ 
| Fan Re eet ae.) D 
Ba CO EE A 


Z 7 A ZI \\ - s: ——_ S i if ij NG. }. S AY (jy) 
g ag. — , | a\ Vane: YZ 
7 ES a A) = Gl) WEN 
4 =p \\ SA ge. 












5% 
8K, > 
Sy q 
SSE 


Fie. 114. 


assembly of the Olympians all inscribed; Zeus himself with his 
thunderbolt and Ganymede about to fill his wine cup, Athene 
holding helmet and lance, Hermes with a flower, Hebe, Hestia with 


1 Wiener Vorlegeblitter, Serie D, Taf.1and2. The vase is now in the Municipal 
Museum at Corneto. 


368 Dionysos [CH. 


flower and a branch, Aphrodite with dove and flower, Ares 
with helmet and lance. We might not have named them right 
but for their inscriptions. Hera and Poseidon are absent, Demeter 
not yet come. At this time the vase-painter is still free to make 
a certain choice, the twelve Olympians are not yet canonical. On 
the obverse the gods are seated waiting, and on the reverse the 
new god is coming in all his splendour in his chariot with vine 
and wine-cup in his hand. With him, characteristically, for he 
is never unaccompanied, come the Satyr Terpes playing on the 
lyre and the Maenad Thero with thyrsos and fawn and snake, and 
behind the chariot another Maenad Kalis with thyrsos and lion 
and a Satyr Terpon playing on the flute. At the close of the 
sixth century when Pratinas and Choirilos and Phrynichus were 
writing, tragedies in his honour, the gates of that exclusive epic 
Olympus could no longer be closed against the people's god, and 
the potter knew it. But there had been a time of doubt and 
debate. We do not have these entries of Athene or Poseidon or 
even Hermes. 


Homer is of course our first literary source and his main notice 
of Dionysos is so characteristic it must be quoted in full. The 
fact that the passage stands alone—elsewhere through all Homer 
Dionysos is of no real account—has led critics to suspect that 
it is of later and local origin. Be that as it may, the story 
glistens like an alien jewel in a bedrock of monotonous fighting. 
Diomede! meets Glaucus in battle, but so great is the hardihood 
of Glaucus that Diomede fears he is one of the immortals and 
makes pious, prudent pause: 

‘I, Diomedes, will not stand ’gainst heavenly Gods in war. 

Not long in life was he of old who raised ’gainst gods his hand 
Strong Lycoérgos, Dryas’ son. Through Nysa’s goodly land 

He Dionysos’ Nursing Nymphs did chase, till down in fear 

They cast their wands upon the ground, so sore he smote them there, 
That fell king with the ox-smiter. But Dionysos fled, 

And plunged him ’neath the salt sea wave. Him sore discomfited 
Fair Thetis to her bosom took. Great fear the god did seize. 
With Lycoérgos they were wroth, those gods that dwell at ease, 
And Kronos’ son did make him blind, and he was not for long, 
The immortal gods they hated him because he did them wrong.’ 

Homer is somewhat mysterious as to the end of Lycurgus— 
‘Not long in life was he.’ Sophocles’ is more explicit, both as to his 


1 Tl. vx. 129. 2 Soph. Ant. 955. 


vur| Dionysos a Thracian 369 


nationality and his doom. He is a Thracian king, son of Dryas, 
and he was ‘rock-entombed.’ When Antigone is going to her 
death the chorus sing how in like fashion others had been forced 
to bend beneath the yoke of the gods, Danae, Lycurgus, the sons 
of Phineus, Oreithyia—three of them Thracians; and of Lycurgus 
they tell: 

‘He was bound by Dionysos, rock-entombed, 

Dryas’ son, Edonian king ; swiftly bloomed 

His dire wrath and drooped. So was he wrought 

To know his blindness and what god he sought 

With gibes mad-tongued. Yea and he set his hand 

To stay the god- inspired band, 

To quell his women and his joyous fire 

And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.’ 

The loss of the Lycurgus trilogy of Aeschylus is hard to bear. 
One scene at least must have been something lke a forecast of the 
Bacchae of Euripides. The dialogue between Lycurgus and the 
stranger-god captured and brought into his presence, is parodied 
by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae and the scholiast’ 


tells us that the words: 
‘Whence does the womanish creature come 2?’ 


occurred in the Hdonians. 

Neither Homer nor Sophocles knew anything of the murder of 
the children. Who first piled up this fresh horror we do not know. 
Vase-paintings of the rather late red-figured style (middle of the 
fifth century B.C.) are our first sources. The punishment of sin 
was to the primitive mind always incomplete unless the offender 
was cut off with his whole family root and branch, and the murder 
of the children may have been an echo of the story of the mad 
Heracles. It is finely conceived on a red-figured krater?. On 
the obverse is the mad Lycurgus with his children dead and 
dying. He swings a double axe (SouvmdAn&). The ‘ox-feller’ of 
Homer is probably a double axe, not a goad. It is the typical 
weapon of the Thracian, and with it the Thracian women regularly 
on vases slay Orpheus (p. 463). Through the air down upon 
Lycurgus swoops a winged demon of madness, probably Lyssa 
herself, and smites at the king with her pointed goad. To the 
left, behind a hill, a Maenad smites her timbrel in token of the 


1 Ar. Thesm. 135, schol. ad loc. 
2 Naples. Heydemann, Cat. 3237. Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, pp. 260, 261, 
figs. 11 and 12. 


H. 24 


oe — Dionysos [ CH. 


presence of the god. On the reverse of the vase we have the 
peace of Dionysos who made all this madness. The god has sent 
his angel against Lycurgus, but no turmoil troubles him or his. 
About him his thiasos of Maenads and Satyrs seem to watch the 
scene, alert and interested but in perfect quiet. 

The exact details of the fate of Lycurgus, varying as they do 
from author to author, are not of real importance. The essential 
thing,.the factor which recurs in story after story, is the rage 
against the dominance of a new god, the blind mad fury, the 
swift sudden helpless collapse at the touch of a real force. This 
is no symbol of the coming of the spring or the gathering of the 
vintage. It is the mirrored image of a human experience, of 
the passionate vain beating of man against what is not man and 
is more and less than man. 

The nature and essence of the new influence will be in part 
determined later. For the present the question that presses 
for solution is ‘whence did it come?’ ‘where was the primitive 
seat of the worship of Dionysos ?’ 


The testimony of historians, from Herodotus to Dion Cassius, 
is uniform, and confirms the witness of Homer and Sophocles. 
Herodotus! tells how Xerxes, when he marched through Thrace, 
compelled the sea tribes to furnish him with ships and those 
that dwelt inland to follow by land. Only one tribe, the Satrae, 
would suffer no compulsion, and then come the significant words: 
‘The Satrae were subject to no man so far as we know, but down 
to our own day they alone of all the Thracians are free, for 
they dwell on high mountains covered with woods of all kinds 
and snow-clad, and they are keenly warlike. These are the people 
that possess an oracle shrine of Dionysos and this oracle is on the 
topmost range of their mountains. And those among the Satrae 
who interpret the oracle are called Bessi; it is a priestess who 
utters the oracles as it is at Delphi, and the oracles are nothing 
more extraordinary than: that.’ Herodotus is not concerned with 
the religion of Dionysos; he does not even say that the religion 
of Dionysos spread southward into Greece, but he states the 
all-important fact that the Satrae were never conquered. They 
_ received no religion from without. Here among those splendid 


1 Herod. vir. 110. 


- 





— 


er 


vit | Dionysos and the Bessi » 371 


= zt 
rn 


A 
_ unconquerable savages in their mountain fastnesses was the real 
home of the god. 

Herodotus speaks of the Bessi as though they were a kind of 
priestly caste among the Satrae, but Strabo’ knows of them as 
the wildest and fiercest of the many brigand tribes that dwelt on 
and around Mt. Haemus. All the tribes about Mt. Haemus were, 
he says, ‘much addicted to brigandage, but the Bessi who possessed 
the greater part of Mt. Haemus were called brigands by brigands. 
They are the sort of people who live in huts in very miserable 
fashion, and they extend as far as Rhodope and the Paeonians.’ 
He mentions the Bessi again’ as a tribe living high up on the 
Hebrus at the furthest point where the river is navigable, and 
again emphasizes their tendency to brigandage. 

The evil reputation of the Bessi lasted on till Christian days, 
till they bowed beneath the yoke of a greater than Dionysos. 
Towards the end of the fourth century A.D. the good Bishop of 
Dacia, Niketas, carried the gospel to these mountain wolves and, 
if we may trust the congratulatory ode written to him by his 
friend Paulinus, he carried it not in vain. Paulinus celebrates 
the conversion of the Bessi as follows: 

‘Hard were their lands and hard those Bessi bold, 
Cold were their snows, their hearts than snow more cold, 


Sheep in the fold from roaming now they cease, 
Thy fold of peace. 


Untamed of war, ever did they refuse 

To bow their heads to servitude’s hard use, 

’Neath the true yoke their necks obedient 
Are gladly bent. 


They who were wont with sweat and manual toil 

To delve their sordid ore from out the soil 

Now for their wealth with inward joy untold 
Garner heaven’s gold. 


There where of old they prowled like savage beasts, 
Now is the joyous rite of angel feasts. 
The brigands’ cave is now a hiding place 

For men of grace?) 


1 Strabo vit. § 318. 2 Strabo frg. vit. 
3 Paulinus Nol. carm. xax. de reditu Niket. Episc. in Daciam. 
Nam simul terris animisque duri 
et sua Bessi nive duriores 
nunc oves facti duce te gregantur 
pacis in aulam. 
quasque cervices dare servituti 
semper a bello indomiti negarant 
nune iugo veri domini subactas 
sternere gaudent. 


372 Dionysos | [ CH. 


Thucydides? in his account of Thracian affairs is silent about 
the Bessi and his silence surprises us. It is probably accounted 
for by the fact that in his days the Odrysae had complete supremacy, 
a supremacy that seems to have lasted down to the days of Roman 
domination. The autochthonous tribes were necessarily obscured. 
He mentions however certain mountain peoples who had retained 
their autonomy against Sitalkes king of the Odrysae and calls them 
by the collective name Dioi. Among them were probably the 
Bessi, for we learn from Pliny? that the.Bessi were known by 
many names, among them that of Dio-Bessi. It seems possible 
that to these Dio-Bessi the god may have owed one of his many 
names. 


In the face of all this historical evidence, it is at first a little 
surprising to find that, in the Bacchae of Euripides, Dionysos is 
no Thracian. He is Theban born, and comes back to Thebes, 
after long triumphant wanderings not in Thrace but in Asia, 
through Lydia, Phrygia to uttermost Media and Arabia. On this 
point Euripides is explicit. In the prologue* Dionysos says: 


‘Far now behind me lies the golden land 

Of Lydian and of Phrygian—far away 

The wide, hot plains where Persian sun-beams play, 
The Bactrian war-holds and the storm-oppressed 
Clime of the Mede and Araby the blest, 

And Asia all, that by the salt sea lies 

In proud embattled cities, motley-wise 

Of Hellene and Barbarian interwrought, 

And now I come to Hellas, having taught 

All the world else my dances and my rite 

Of mysteries, to show me in man’s sight 
Manifest God.’ 


Dionysos is made to come from without, not as an immigrant 


nunc magis dives pretio laboris 

Bessus exultat, quod humi manuque 

ante quaerebat, modo mente caeli 
colligit aurum. 

* * * * * * 


mos ubi quondam fuerat ferarum, 
nunc ibi ritus viget angelorum 
et latet justus quibus ipse latro 
vixit in antris. 
For this and many other valuable references about the Bessi, I am indebted to 
Dr Tomaschek’s article ‘Ueber Brumalia und Rosalia,’ Sitzungsber. d. K. Akad. d. 
Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Kl., Wien 1868, p. 351. 
1 Thueyd. 1. 96. 
Se Plin Nei. tyenlon ales ® Eur. Bacch. 13. 





VO] Dionysos in the ‘ Bacchae’ | 373 


stranger but as an exile returned. Moreover, if historical tradition 
be true, he is made to come from the wrong place. He comes 
also attended by a train of barbarian women, Asiatic not Thracian. 
They chant their oriental origin': 


‘From Asia, from the day-spring that uprises, 
From Tmolus ever glorying we come,’ 


and again?: 
‘Hither, O fragrant of Tmolts the golden,’ 


Yet Euripides wrote the play in Macedonia and must have 
known perfectly well that these Macedonian rites that so im- 
pressed his imagination were from Thrace; that, as Plutarch 
tells us*, ‘The women called Klodones and Mimallones performed 
rites which were the same as those done by the Edonian women 
and the Thracian women about the Haemus. He knows it 
perfectly well and when he is off his guard betrays his knowledge. 
In the epode of the third choric song+ he makes Dionysos come 
to bless Pieria and in his coming cross the two Macedonian rivers, 


the Axios and Lydias: 


‘Blessed land of Pierie, 
Dionysos loveth thee, 
He will come to thee with dancing, 
Come with joy and mystery, 
With the Maenads at his hest 
Winding, winding to the west; 
Cross the flood of swiftly glancing 
Axios in majesty, 
Cross the Lydias, the giver 
Of good gifts and waving green, 
Cross that Father Stream of story 
Through a land of steeds and glory 
Rolling, bravest, fairest River 
Her of mortals seen.’ 


Euripides as poet can afford to contradict himself. He accepts 
popular tradition, too careless of it to attempt an irrelevant con- 
sistency. It matters nothing to him whence the god came*®. The 
Theban birth-place, the home-coming were essential to the human 


1 Eur. Bacch. 65. 2 Tb. 152. 

3 Plut. Vit. Alex. 2. 4 Kur. Bacch. 565. 

5 To Euripides in the Bacchae Dionysos is the god of the grape. The vine 
probably came from Asia, though about this experts do not seem to be agreed, 
see Schrader, Real-lexicon; but Dionysos, as will later be shown, is earlier than the 
coming of the vine. 


374 Dionysos [ CH. 7 


pathos of his story. But for that we should have missed the 
appeal to Dirce': 


‘ Achelous’ roaming daughter, 
Holy Dirce, virgin water, 
Bathed he not of old in thee 
The Babe of God, the Mystery ?’ 
and again”: 
‘Why, O Blessed among Rivers, 
Wilt thou fly me and deny me? 
By his own joy I vow, 
By the grape upon the bough, 
Thou shalt seek him in the midnight, thou shalt love him even now.’ 


He came unto his own and his own received him not. 

When we examine the evidence of art, we find that the simple 
vase-painter accepts the fact that Dionysos has become a Greek, 
and does not raise the question whence he came. In black and 
early red figured designs Dionysos is almost uniformly dressed as 
a Greek and attended by Greek Maenads. Later the artist becomes 
emore learned and dresses Dionysos as a Thracian or occasionally 
as an Oriental. The vase-painting® in fig. 115, from a late aryballos 








in the British Museum, has been usually interpreted as repre- 
senting the Oriental triumph of Dionysos. Rightly so, I incline 
to think, because the figure on the camel is attended not only 
by Orientals but by Greek maidens playing on cymbals. Their 
free upward bearing contrasts strongly with the strange abject 


fantastic posturings of the Orientals. It must however be 


1 Eur. Bacch. 519. 2 Ib. 530. 
3’ B.M. Cat. & 695. Mon. d. Inst. 1833 tav. x. 





vim | Dionysos a Phrygio-Thracian 375 


distinctly borne in mind that the figure on the camel carries no 
Dionysiac attributes and cannot be certainly said to be the god. 


The question remains—why did popular tradition, accepted by 
Euripides and embodied occasionally in vase-paintings, point to 
Asia rather than to the real home, Thrace? The answer in the 
main is given by Strabo! in his important account of the pro- 
venance of the orgiastic worships of Greece. Strabo is noting 
that Pindar, like Euripides, regards the rites of Dionysos as 
substantially the same with those performed by the Phrygians in 
honour of the Great Mother. ‘Very similar to these are,’ he adds, 
‘the rites called Kotytteia and Bendideia, celebrated among the 
Thracians. Nor is it at all unlikely that, as the Phrygians 
themselves are colonists from the Thracians, they brought their 
religious rites from thence.’ In a fragment? of the lost seventh 
book he is still more explicit. He is mentioning the mountain 
Bernicos as formerly in possession of the Briges, and the Briges, 
he says, were ‘a Thracian tribe of which some portion went across 
ito Asia and were called by a modified name, Phrygians.’ 

The solution is simple and is indeed almost a geographical 
necessity. If the Thracians dwelling in the ranges of Rhodope 
and Haemus went south at all, they would inevitably split up 
into two branches. The one would move westward into Macedonia, 
across the Axios and Lydias into Thessaly and thence downwards 
to Delphi, Thebes and Attica; the other eastward across the 
Bosporus or the Hellespont into Asia. Minor. Greek colonists 
in Asia Minor would recognize in the orgiastic cults they found 
there elements akin to their own worship of Dionysos. Wise 
men are not slow to follow the star that leads to the east, and it 
was pleasanter to admit a debt to Asia Minor than to own kinship 
with the barbarous north. Similarity of names, e.g. Lydias and 
Lydia, may have helped out the illusion and most of all the 
Theban legend of the Phoenician Kadmos*. 

But mythology is too unconscious not to betray itself. 
Herodotus‘ says that the Thracians worship three gods only: 
Ares, Dionysos and Artemis. Between Ares and Dionysos there 

1 Strabo x. 3 § 470. 2 Strabo frg. 25. 

3 For the orientalism of the Theban character and legends, see Mr D. G. 


Hogarth, Philip and Alexander, p. 34. 
4 Herod. v. 7. 


376 ae Dionysos (CH. 


would seem to be but little in common, but in one current myth 
their kinship comes out all unconsciously. It is just these un- 
conscious revelations that are in mythology of cardinal importance. 
The story is that known as ‘the bonds of Hera’ (“Hpas decpoi). 
Hephaistos, to revenge himself for his downfall from heaven, sent 
to his mother Hera a golden throne with invisible bonds. The 
Olympians took counsel how they might free their queen. None 
but Hephaistos knew the secret of loosing. Ares' vowed he would 
bring Hephaistos by force. Hephaistos drove him off with fire- 
brands. Force failed, but Hephaistos yielded to the seduction of 
Dionysos and was brought in drunken triumph back to Olympus. 
It was a good subject for broad comedy, and Epicharmus used it 
in his ‘ Revellers or Hephaistos.” It attained a rather singular 
popularity in art; the subject occurs on upwards of thirty vase- 
paintings black and red, figured. Earlier than any literary source 











Fie. 116. 


for the myth is unquestionably the famous Frangois? vase (early 
sixth century B.c.) in the Museo Civico at Florence, where the - 
scene is depicted in broad epic fashion and with some conscious 


1 Sappho, frg. 66. 
2 Wiener Vorlegeblitter, Serie u. Taf. iii., iv. Am even earlier source is the 
Corinthian vase published by Dr Léschke, A. Mitt. 1894, p. 524, Taf. viii. 





vir | Dionysos and Ares 377 


humour. All the figures are inscribed. Zeus is there and Hera, 
seated on the splendid, fatal throne. Dionysos leads the mule on 
which sits the drunken Hephaistos. Up they come into the very 
presence of Zeus with three attendant Silenoi carrying respectively 
a wine-skin, a flute,a woman. It is the regular revel rout. Be- 
hind the throne of Hera crouches Ares in deep dejection, on a 
sort of low stool of repentance, while Athene looks back at him 
with scorn. Why are Ares and Dionysos thus set in rivalry ? 
Not merely because wine is mightier than war, but because the 
two, Ares and Dionysos, are Thracian rivals, with Hephaistos of 
Lemnos for a third, It is a bit of local mythology transplanted 
later to Olympus. 

The diverse fates of these two Thracian gods are instructive. 
Ares was realized as a Thracian to the end. In Homer he is 
only half accepted in Olympus, he is known as a ruffian and a 
swashbuckler and lke Aphrodite escapes! to his home as soon as 
he is released : 

‘Straightway forth sprang the twain ; 


To savage Thrace went Ares, but Kypris with sweet smile 
Hied her to her fair altar place, in pleasant Paphos’ isle.’ 


The newly admitted gods, such as Ares and Aphrodite, are 
never really at home in Olympus. Dionysos, as has already been 
seen (p. 366), has no place in the Homeric Olympus, but, once he 
does force an entry, his seat is far more stable. In the Oedipus 
Tyrannos Sophocles’ realizes that Dionysos and Ares are the 
great Theban divinities, but Ares is of slaughter and death, 
Dionysos of gladness and life. He makes his chorus summon 
Dionysos to banish Ares his fellow divinity : 


‘O thou with golden mitre band, 
Named for our land, 
On thee in this our woe 
I call, thou ruddy Bacchus all aglow 

With wine and Bacchant song. © 

Draw nigh, thou and thy Maenad throng, 
Drive from us with bright torch of blazing pine 
The god unhonoured ’mong the gods divine.’ 


Sophocles just hits the theological mark, Ares 7s a god but he 
is unhonoured of the orthodox gods, the Olympians. 


> 1 Od. vit. 265. 2 Soph. Oed. Tyr. 209. 


378 Dionysos [ CH. 


Euripides’ too lets out the kinship with Ares. He knows of 
‘Harmonia, daughter of the Lord of War,’ 


Harmonia, bride of Kadmos, mother of Semele, and though his 
Dionysos is at the outset all gentleness and magic, his kingdom 
scarcely of this world, Teiresias? knows that he is not only Teacher, 
Healer, Prophet, but 
‘of Ares’ realm a part hath he. 

When mortal armies mailéd and arrayed 

Have in strange fear, or ever blade met blade, 

Fled, maddened, ’tis this god hath palsied them,’ 
and though the panic he sends is from within not without, yet 
the mention is signifféant. Dionysos, for all his sweetness, is to 
the end militant, he came not to bring peace upon the earth but a » 
sword, only in late authors his weapons are not those of Ares, 
On vase-paintings he is not unfrequently depicted doing on his 
actual armour, but Polyaenus*, in the little treatise on mytho- 
logical warriors with which he prefaces his Strategika, notes the 
secret armour of the god, the lance hidden in ivy, the fawn-skin 
and soft raiment for breastplate, the cymbals and drum for 
trumpet. To the end the god of the brigand Bessi was Lord 
of War. 

Art tells the same tale, that the Thracian Dionysos succeeded 
where the equally Thracian Ares failed. Among the archaic 
seated gods on the frieze of the treasury of Cnidos recently dis- 
covered at Delphi* Ares has found a place, but a significant one, 
at the very end, on a seat by himself, as though naively to mark 
the difference. Even on the east frieze of the Parthenon, where 
all is softened down to a decent theological harmony, there is just 
a lingering, semi-conscious touch of the same prejudice. Ares is 
admitted indeed, but he is not quite at home among these easy 
aristocratic Olympians. He is grouped with no one, he leans his 
arm on no one’s shoulder; even his pose is a little too consciously 
assured to be quite confident. 

It is abundantly clear that the remote Asiatic origin of 
Dionysos is emphasized to hide a more immediate Thracian 
provenance. The Greeks knew the god was not home-grown, 


1 Bur. Bacch. 1356. 2 Ib. 302. 3 Polyaen. Strat. 1. 1. 
4 This remarkable frieze is in the local museum at Delphi and is not as yet 
completely published. 





Vit | Dionysos and Nysa 379 


but he was so great, so good, so all-conquering, that they were 
forced to accept him. But they could not bear the truth, that 
he came from their rough north-country kinsmen the Thracians. 
They need not have been ashamed of these Northerners, who were 
as well born as and more bravely bred than themselves. Even 
Herodotos' owns that ‘the nation of the Thracians is the greatest 
among men, except at least the Indians.’ 


Once fairly uprooted from his native Thracian soil, it was 
easy to plant Dionysos anywhere and everywhere wherever went 
his worshippers. His homeless splendour grows and grows till by 
the time of Diodorus his birthplace is completely apocryphal. In 
Homer, as has been seen (p. 368), Nysa or ast is called Nyseion, 
whether it be mountain or plain, is clearly in Thrace, home of 
Lycurgus son of Dryas. But already in Sophocles?, in the beautiful 
fragment preserved by Strabo, wherever it may be, it is a place 
touched by magic, a silent land which 


‘The horned Iacchus loves for his dear nurse, 
Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird.’ 

Euripides? never expressly states where he supposes Nysa to 
be, but the name comes to his lips coupled with the Korykian 
peaks on Parnassos and the leafy haunts of Olympus, so we may 
suppose he believed it to be northwards. As the horizon of the 
Greeks widened, Nysa is pushed further and further away to an 
ever more remote Nowhere. Diodorus* with much circumstance 
settles it in Libya on an almost inaccessible island surrounded by 
the river Triton. It mattered little so long as it was a far-off 
happy land. 

Convinced as he was of this remote African Nysa and of the 
great Asiatic campaign of Dionysos, it is curious to note that even 
Diodorus cannot rid his mind of Thrace. He knows of course the 
story of the Thracian Lycurgus and mentions incidentally that it 
was in a place called Nysion that Lycurgus set upon the Maenads 
and slew them, he knows too of the connection between Dionysos 
and Orpheus’ and never doubts but that Orpheus was a Thracian, 
a matter to be discussed later. Most significant of all, when he is 


1 Herod. v. 3. 
2 Soph. frg. 782 ap. Strab. xv. 687. 3 Eur. Bacch. 556. 
4 Diod. ur. 4. 5 Ib. 65. 


380 Dionysos [ CH. 


speaking? of the trieteric ceremonies instituted \m memory of 
the Indian expedition, he automatically records that these were 
celebrated not only by Boeotians and the other Greeks but by the 
Thracians. Thrace is obscured by the glories of Phrygia, Lydia, 
Phoenicia, Arabia and Libya, but never wholly forgotten. 





THE SATYRS. 


_— 


Dionysos then, whatever his nature, is an immigrant god, a 
late comer, and he enters Greece from the north, from Thrace. 
He comes not unattended. With him are always his revel rout 
of Satyrs and of Maenads. This again marks him out from the 
rest of the Olympians; Poseidon, Athene, Apollo, Zews—himself 
has no such accompaniment. As man makes the gods in his own 
image, it may be well before we examine the nature and functions 
of Dionysos to observe the characteristics of his attendant worship- 
pers, to determine who and what they are and whence they come. 

The Satyrs first—they are (what else should they, could they 
be?) the Satrae?; and these Satrae-Satyrs have many traits in 
common with the more mythological Centaurs. The evidence of 
the coins of Macedonia is instructive. On the coins of Orreskii’, 
a centaur, a horse-man, bears off a woman in his arms. At Lete 
close at hand, with a coinage closely resembling in style, fabric, 
weight the money of the Orreskii and other Pangaean tribes, the 





Fiae.. 117. 


type is the same in content, though with an instructive difference 
of form—a naked Satyr or Seilenos with the hooves, ears and tail 





SS DIOU VG: 

* This was first, I believe, observed by Dr Head (Hist. Num. p. 176). In 
discussing the coinage of Lete in Macedonia he says: ‘The coin types all refer to 
the orgiastic rites practised in the worship of the mountain Bacchus, which 
originated in the country of the Satrae or Satyrs’ (Herod. vir. 111). 

* Prof. Ridgeway (Harly Age of Greece, vol. 1. p. 343) identifies the Orreskii of 
the coins with the Orestae of Strabo (§ 434). He thinks tlie slight difference in 
form is due to a copyist’s mistake of r for x. 


e 


| 


9 iam - a ey Pe eee. we . wv 


vir | Satyrs and Centaurs 381 


of a horse seizes a woman round the waist. These coins are of 
the sixth century B.c. Passing to Thasos, a colony of the Thracians 
and like it rich in the coinage that came of gold mines, we find 
the same type. Ona series of coins that range from circ. 500— 
411 B.c. we have again the Satyr or Seilenos bearing off the woman. 
An instance, for clearness’ sake one of comparatively late date’, 
is given in fig. 117. 

This interchange of types, Satyr and Centaur, is evidence 
about which there can be no mistake. Satyr and Centaur, 
slightly diverse forms of the horse-man, are in essence one and 
the same. Nonnus? is right: ‘the Centaurs are of the blood of 
the shaggy Satyrs. It remains to ask—who are the Centaurs ? 


There are few mythological figures about which more pleasant 
baseless fancies have been woven; woven irresponsibly, because 
mythologists are slow to face solid historical fact; woven because, 
intoxicated by comparative philology, they refuse to seek for the 
origin of a myth in its historical birthplace. The Centaurs, it 


used to be said, are Vedic Gandharvas, cloud-demons. Mythology 


now-a-days has fallen from the clouds, and with it the Centaurs. 
They next became mountain torrents, the offspring of the cloud 
that settles on the mountain top. The Centaurs have possession 
of a wine-cask, the imprisoned forces of the earth’s fertility 
are left in charge of the genius of the mountain. The cask is 
opened, this is the unlocking of the imprisoned forces at the 
approach of Herakles, the sun in spring, and this unlocking is 
the signal for the mad onset of the Centaurs, the wild rush of 
the torrents. Of the making of such mythology truly there is 
no end. 

Homer? knew quite well who the opponents of Peirithois were, 
not cloud-demons, not mountain torrents, but real wild men (dfpes), 
as real as the foes they fought with. He tells of the heroes Dryas, 
father of Lycurgus, and Peirithods and Kaineus: 


‘Mightiest were they, and with the mightiest fought, 
With wild men mountain-haunting. 


1 Head, Hist. Num. p. 176. 
2 Nonnus, Dionys. x1. 43 
kal Naciwy Laripwv Kevravpidos aiua yevébdys. 
ST aie 202 
KaprioToe wey cay Kai Kaptictos éuaxovTo 
_gnpsly épecxwoact. 
3 


* 


382 Dionysos [ CH. 


No one has, so far as we know, reduced the mighty Peirithods, 
Dryas and Lycurgus to mountain torrents or sun myths. Why 
are their mighty foes to be less human ? 

Again in the: Catalogue of the Ships! we are told how 


Peirithoés 


‘Took vengeance on the shaggy mountain-men, 
Drave them from Pelion to the Aithikes far.’ 


In the name of common sense, did Peirithods expel a storm- 
cloud or a mountain torrent and force it to leave Pelion and settle 
elsewhere? The vengeance of Peirithods is simply the expulsion 
of one wild tribe by another. 

In these passages from the Jliad the foes of Peirithods are 
simply a tribe of wild men, Pheres. In the Odyssey, Homer” calls 
these same foes by the name Kentauri, and implies that they are 
non-human. Speaking of the peril of ‘honey-sweet wine’ he 
says: 

‘Thence ’gan the feud *twixt Centaurs and mankind.’ 

For the right understanding of this later non-humanity of the 
Centaurs the development of their art type is of paramount 
importance. 


We are apt to think of the Centaurs exclusively somewhat as 
they appear on the metopes of the Parthenon, 1e. as splendid 
horses with the head and trunk of a man. By the middle of the 
fifth century B.c. in knightly horse-loving Athens the horse form 
had got the upper hand. In archaic representations the reverse 
is the case. The Centaurs are in art what they are in reality, 
men with men’s legs and feet, but they are shaggy mountain men 
with some of the qualities and habits of beasts; so to indicate this 
in a horse-loving country they have the hind-quarters of a horse 
awkwardly tacked on to their human bodies. 

A good example is the vase-painting in fig. 118 from an early 
black-figured lekythos in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Vases 
of this style cannot be dated later than the beginning of the 
sixth century B:c. and may be somewhat earlier®. The scene 


Si iads (fall 
bre pinpas érloaro Naxvievras 
tous 6’ €x IIndlov woe cal Aldixeoou réNaccev. 
2 Od. xx1. 303 é& ob Kevravipouor kal dvdpace veixos érvxOn. 
3 Boston, Inv. No. 6508. American Journal of Archaeology 1900, pl. v1. p. 441. 
The vase belongs to the class usually called ‘proto-Corinthian.’ Mr J. C. Hopkins 
prefers to call it ‘Argive.’ 





Vir | Satyrs and Centaurs 


383 


represented is the fight of Herakles with the Centaurs. To the 
left is a Centaur holding in his right hand a branch, the primitive 





weapon of a primitive combatant. He is figured as a complete 
man with a horse-trunk appended. In the original drawing the 


horse-trunk is made more obviously an extra 
appendage from the fact that the human 
body is painted red and the horse-trunk 
black. Herakles too is a fighter with rude 
_ weapons; he carries his club, which in this 
case is plainly what its Greek name indi- 
cates, a rough hewn trunk or branch or 


possibly root of a tree. The remainder of 


the design is not so clear and does not 
affect the present argument. The man 
with the sword to the right is probably 
Tolaos. The object surmounted by the 
eagles I am quite unable to explain. 





Fic. 119. 


The next stage in the development of the Centaur is seen 


in the archaic gem from the British 
Museum! in fig. 120. Here the notice- 
able point is that the Centaur, though 
he has still the body of a man, is 
beginning to be more of a horse. He 
has hoofs for feet. He is behaving 
just like the Satyr on the coin in 
fig. 117, or the aggressor on the Francois 
vase (fig. 116), he is carrying off a 





Fic. 120. 


1 J.H.S. vol. 1. p. 130, fig. 1, published and discussed with other art representa- 


tions by Mr Sidney Colvin. 


384 Dionysos [CH. 


woman. It is the last step in the transition to the Centaur of 
the Parthenon, i.e. the horse with head and trunk of a man. 
Between Satyr and Centaur the sole difference is this: the 
Centaur, primarily a wild man, became more and more of a 
horse, the Satyr resisted the temptation and remained to the 
end what he was at the beginning, a wild man, with horse 
adjuncts of ears, tail and occasionally hoofs. Greek art, as has 
been already seen in discussing the Gorgon, was liberal in its 
experiments with monster forms, the horse Medusa failed (p. 179), 
the horse Centaur prevailed. 

The Parthenon type of the Centaur, the type im which the 
horse-form is predominant, obtains later in red-figured vase- 
paintings for all Centaurs save one, the virtuous Cheiron. 
Cheiron always keeps his human feet and legs and often wears a 
decent cloak to mark his gentle civilized citizenship. Pausanias? 
when examining the chest of Kypselos at Olympia, a monument 
dedicated in the seventh century B.c., noted this peculiarity: 
‘And the Centaur has not all his feet like a horse, but the front 
feet are the feet of a man.’ Pindar* does definitely in the case of 
Cheiron identify dyp and Kévtavpos, but art kept for Cheiron the 
more primitive and human type to emphasize his humanity, for he 
is the trainer of heroes, the utterer of wise saws, the teacher of all 
gentle arts of music and medicine, he has the kind heart of a man. 

The charming little design in fig. 121 is from an oinochoé in 








t 
i 





Fie. 121. 


' Tt is, it would seem, a mere chance that we have not what might be called 
a ‘fish Centaur.’ On an early black-figured vase (2%. Mitt. mu. 1887, Taf. viii.) we 
have a series of men represented as completely human, not with the body ending 
in fish tails, but with an extra fish tail added to the complete human body. These 
are the natural monster-forms of a people dwelling on the sea-coast. 

uly avon UO so; & Pind yt; Iso, 


- conquerors to the conquered. This attitude is, ail the world over 


Vir | Satyrs and Centaurs 385 


the British Museum’. Though the technique is black-figured the 
delicate soft style is archaistic rather than archaic and the vase is 
probably not older than the middle of the fifth century B.c. The 
good Cheiron is a quaint blend of horse and middle-aged citizen. 
The tree branch he still carries looks back to the primitive habits 
he has left far behind, and the little tree in front marks the 
woodland home. But there is nothing shaggy about his neat 
decorous figure. Even the dog who used to go hunting with him 
is now alert to give a courteous welcome to the guest. A father 
is bringing his child, a little miniature copy of himself, to be 
reared in the school of Cheiron. Father and son are probably 
Peleus and Achilles, but the child might be Jason or even 
Asklepios. It is the good Centaur only who concerns us. How 
has he of the mountains, fierce and untameable, come to keep a 
preparatory school for young heroes? The answer to this question 
is interesting and instructive. 


Prof. Ridgeway? has shown that in the mythology of the 
Centaurs we have a reflection of the attitude of mind of the 
a double one. The conquerors are apt to regard the conquered 
with mixed feelings, mainly, it is true, with hatred and aversion, 
but in part with reluctant awe. ‘The conquerors respect the 
conquered as wizards, familiar with the spirits of the land, and 
employ them for sorcery, even sometimes when relations are 
peaceable employ them as foster-fathers for their sons, yet they 
impute to them every evil and bestial characteristic and believe 
them to take the form of wild beasts. The conquered for their ~ 
part take refuge in mountain fastnesses and make reprisals in the 
characteristic fashion of Satyrs and Centaurs by carrying off the 
women of their conquerors.’ 

Nonnus is again right, it was jealousy that gave to the Satyrs 
their horns, their manes, tusks and tails, but not, as Nonnus 
supposed, the jealousy of Hera, but of primitive conquering man 
who gives to whatever is hurtful to himself the ugly form that 
utters and relieves his hate*. It should not be hard for us to 


1 B.M. Cat. 8 620. J.H.S. vol. t. pl. ii. p. 132. 

2 Early Age of Greece, vol. 1. p. 177. 

3 An analogous case to the Satyrs and Centaurs has already been noted (p. 172), 
i.e. the Keres, regarded as Telchines, and of monstrous forms; and still more clear 
is the case of the Kyklopes (p. 190), barbarous monsters yet builders and craftsmen. 


H. ~ 25 


386 Dionysos [ CH. 


realize this impulse; our own devil, with horns and tail and hoofs, 


died hard and recently. 

Most instructive of all as to the real nature of the Centaurs 
‘and their close analogy to the Satrai-Satyroi is the story of the 
opening of the wine cask. Pindar’ tells how 


‘Then when the wild men knew 
The scent of honeyed wine that tames men’s souls, 
Straight from the board they thrust the white milk-bowls 
With hurrying hands, and of their own will flew 

To the horns of silver wrought, 

And drank and were distraught.’ 


Storm-clouds and mountain torrents, nay even four-footed 
beasts do not get drunk, the perfume of wine is for the subduing 
of man alone. The wild things (ffpes) are all human, ‘they 
thrust with their hands.’ 

The scene is a favourite one on vases. One of the earliest 
representations is given in fig. 122 from a skyphos in the 
Louvre®. It dates about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. 
The scene is the cave of the Centaur Pholos. The great pithos or 


Taree) SY TR 
we» = VAG ae 
N74 rT 


Nae Yas = 


Fie. 122. 


















wine jar is open. Pholos himself has a large wine-cup in his hand. 
Pholos is sober still, he is a sort of Cheiron, but not so the rest. 
They are mad with drink and are hustling and fighting in wild 
confusion. Herakles comes out and tries to restore order. Wine 
has come for the first time to a primitive population unused to so 
strong an intoxicant. The result is the same all over the world. 
A like notion comes out in the popular myth of the wedding feast 
of Peirithods; the Centaurs taste wine and fall to fighting and in 
Satyr fashion seek to ravish the bride. ‘hese stories are of para- 
mount importance because they point the analogy between two 
sets of primitive worshippers of Dionysos, the Centaurs and the 
Satrai-Satyroi. 

1 Pind, frg. 44. 

2 J.H.S.1. Pl. ii. Engelmann, Bilder-Atlas, 110. 


Vir | — Satyrs and Centaurs 387 


To these Satrai-Satyroi we must now return. It is now 
sufficiently clear that, whatever they became to a later imagi- 
nation, to Homer and Pindar and the vase-painters these horse- 
men, these attendants of Dionysos, were not fairies, not ‘spirits 
of vegetation, though from such they may have borrowed many 
traits, but the representatives of an actual primitive popula- 
tion. They owe their monstrous form, their tails, their horses’ 
ears and hoofs, not to any desire to express ‘ powers of fertiliza- 
tion’ but to the malign imagination of their conquerors. They 
are not incarnations of a horse-god Dionysos'—such a being 
never existed—they are simply Satrai. It is not of course denied 
that they ultimately became mythological, that is indeed indicated 
by the gradual change of form. Asa rule the Greek imagination 
tends to anthropomorphism, but here we have a reverse case. 
By lapse of time and gradual oblivion of the historical facts of 
conquest, what was originally a primitive man developes in the 
case of the-Centaurs into a mythological horse-demon. 


The Satyrs undergo no such change, they remain substantially 
human. The element of horse varies but is never predominant. 





Fie. 123. 


The form in which there is most horse is well shown in fig. 123. 
This picture is from the reverse of the cylix in the Wiirzburg 
Museum2, on which is depicted the feast of Phineus already 


1 The animal form assumed by Dionysos was (as will later be shown, p. 432) that 
of a bull. Had his own worshippers invented the monstrous Satyrs, they would 
probably have chosen the bull shape. With the horse Dionysos, unlike his 
attendants, has no affinities. : 

2 Wiirzburg, No. 354. Mon. d. Inst. x. 8a. Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, 
p. Ixxix. 


25—2 
a 25 


388 Dionysos [ CH. 


discussed (p. 225). The fact is worth noting that both repre- 
sentations come from a Thracian cycle of mythology. Phineus 
is a Thracian hero, Dionysos a Thracian god. Dionysos stands in 
a chariot to which are yoked a lion and a stag. By his side is a 
woman, probably a goddess, but whether Ariadne or Semele cannot 
certainly be determined, nor for the present argument does it 
matter. The god has stopped to water his steeds at a fountain. 
Satyrs attend him, one is drawing water from the well basin, 
another clambers on the lion’s back. Some maidens have bathed 
at the fountain, and are resting under a palm tree, one is just 
struggling back into her clothes. Two prying Satyrs look on ~ 
with evil in their hearts. They are wild men with shaggy bodies, 
rough hair, horses’ ears and tails, and they have the somewhat 
exceptional addition of hoofs; the human part of them is closely 
analogous to the shaggy Centaurs of fig. 122. 

The Satyrs are not pleasant to contemplate; they are ugly in 
form and degraded in habits, and but for a recent theory’ it might 
not be needful to emphasize so strongly their nature and functions. 
This theory, which has gained wide and speedy popularity, main- 
tains that the familiar horse-men of black and red figured vases 
are not Satyrs at all. The Satyrs, we are told, are goat-men, the 
horse-men of the vases are Seilenoi. This theory, if true, would 
cut at the root of our whole argument. To deny the identity of 
the horse-men with the Satyrs is to deny their identity with 

| the Satrai, ie. with the primitive population who worshipped 
Dionysos. 

~ Why then, with the evidence of countless vase-paintings to 
support us, may we not call the horse-men who accompany 
Dionysos Satyrs? Because, we are told, tragedy is the goat-song, 
the goat-song gave rise to the Satyric drama, hence the Satyrs 
must be goat-demons, hence they cannot be horse-demons, hence 
the horse-demons of vases cannot be Satyrs, hence another 
name must be found for them. On the Francois-vase (fig. 116) 
the horse-demons are inscribed Seilenoi, hence let the name 
Seilenoi be adopted for all horse-demons. Be it observed that 
the whole complex structure rests on the philological assumption 
that tragedy means the goat-song. What tragedy really does or _ 

! The literature of this controversy is fully given and discussed by Dr K. Wernicke, 

‘Bockschore und Satyrdrama,’ Hermes xxx, 1897, p. 29. 


zo 





vor] The Maenads 389 


at least may mean will be considered later (p. 421); for the 
present the point is only raised because I hold to the view now 
discredited! that the familiar throng of idle disreputable vicious 
horse-men who constantly on vases attended Dionysos, who drink 
and sport and play and harry women, are none other than 
Hesiod’s? 
‘race 
Of worthless idle Satyrs.’ 

That they are also called Seilenoi I do not for a moment deny. 


In different lands their names were diverse. 


THE MAENADS. 


It is refreshing to turn from the dissolute crew of Satyrs to 
the women-attendants of Dionysos, the Maenads. These Maenads 
are as’real, as actual as the Satyrs; in fact more so, for no poet or 
painter ever attempted to give them horses’ ears and tails. And 
yet, so persistent is the dislike to commonplace fact, that we 
are repeatedly told that the Maenads are purely mythological 
creations and that the Maenad orgies never appear historically in 
Greece. 

It would be a mistake to regard the Maenads as the mere 
female correlatives of the Satyrs. The Satyrs, it has been seen, are 
representations of a primitive subject people, but the Maenads do 
not represent merely the women of the same race. Their name is 
the corruption of no tribal name, it represents a state of mind and 
body, it is almost a cultus-epithet. Maenad means of course 
simply ‘mad woman, and the Maenads are the women-worshippers 
of Dionysos of whatever race, possessed, maddened or, as the 
ancients would say, inspired by his spirit. 

Maenad is only one, though perhaps the most common, of the 
many names applied to these worshipping women. In Macedonia 
Plutarch’ tells us they were called Mimallones and Klodones, in 
Greece, Bacchae, Bassarides, Thyiades, Potmiades and the like. 


1 Since the above was written I see with great pleasure that Dr Emil Reisch in 
his article ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der attischen Tragédie’ (Festschrift Theodor Gomperz 
1902, p. 459) reasserts the old view that the horse-demons of the vases are Satyrs. 

A BWI, sides (Chore 

3 Plut. Vit. Alex. 2. For many references as to the Maenads I am indebted to 
the articles by Dr A. Rapp, ‘Die Maenade in gr. Cultus in der Kunst und Poesie,’ 
Rhein. Mus. 1872, pp. 1 and 562, and for references to the Thyiades to Dr Weniger’s 
Das Collegium der Thyiaden. 


390 Dionysos [ CH. 


Some of the titles crystallized into something like proper names, 
others remained consciously adjectival. At bottom they all ex- 
press the same idea, women possessed by the spirit of Dionysos. 

Plutarch in his charming discourse on Superstition’ tells how 
when the dithyrambic poet Timotheos was chanting a hymn to 
Artemis he addressed the daughter of Zeus thus: 

‘Maenad, Thyiad, Phoibad, Lyssad.’ 

The titles may be Englished as Mad One, Rushing One, In- 
spired One, Raging One. Cinesias the lyric poet, whose own songs 
were doubtless couched in language less orgiastic, got up and said: 
‘T wish you may have such a daughter of your own. The story 
is instructive on two counts. It shows first that Maenad and 
Thyiad were at the date of Timotheos so adjectival, so little 
crystallized into proper names, that they could be applied not 
merely to the worshippers of Dionysos, but to any orgiastic 
divinity, and second the passage is clear evidence that educated 
people, towards the close of the fifth century B.c., were beginning 
to be at issue with their own theological conceptions. Cultus 
practices however, and still more cultus epithets, lay far behind 
educated opinion. It is fortunately possible to prove that the 
epithet Thyiad certainly and the epithets Phoibad and Maenad 
probably, were applied to actually existing historical women. 
The epithet Lyssad, which means ‘raging mad, was not likely 
to prevail out of poetry. The chorus in the Bacchae* call them- — 
selves ‘swift hounds of raging Madness,’ but the title was not 
one that would appeal to respectable matrons. 


We begin with the Thyiades. It is at Delphi that we learn 
most of their nature and worship, Delphi where high on Parnassos 
Dionysos held his orgies. Thus much even Aeschylus, though he 
is ‘all for Apollo,’ cannot deny. To this he makes the priestess * 
in her ceremonial recitation of local powers bear almost reluctant 


witness : 
‘You too I salute, 

Ye nymphs about Korykia’s caverned rock, 
Kindly to birds, haunt of divinities. 
And Bromios, I forget not, holds the place, 
Since first to war he led his Bacchanals, 
And scattered Pentheus, like a riven hare.’ 

1 Plut. de Superstit. x. 

Mawdda Oudda PoBdda Avoodda. 
2 Bur. Bacch. 977. 3 Aesch. Hum, 22. 


VIII | The Maenads 391 


Aeschylus!, intent on monotheism, would fain know only the 
two divinities who were really one, i.e. Zeus and 


‘Loxias utterer of his father’s will, 


the Father and the Son, these and the line of ancient Earth- 
divinities to whom they were heirs. But religious tradition knew 
of another immigrant, Dionysos, and Aeschylus cannot wholly 
ignore him. On the pediments of the great temple were 
sculptured at one end, Pausanias? tells us, Apollo, Artemis, 
Leto and the Muses, and at the other ‘the setting of the» sun 
and Dionysos with his Thyiad women. The ritual year at Delphi 
was divided, as will later be seen, between Apollo and Dionysos. 
The vase-painting in fig. 124 from a krater in the Hermitage 
Museum at St Petersburg* is a brief epitome of the religious 











history of Delphi, marking its three strata. In the foreground is 
the omphalos of Gaia covered with fillets : 


‘First in my prayer before all other gods 

I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess4, 
Gaia, of whom her successors Themis and Phoebe are but by- 
forms. Higher up in the picture are other divinities superimposed 
on this primitive Earth-worship. Apollo and Dionysos clasp hands 
while about them is a company of Maenads and Satyrs. It is 


1 Aesch. Hum. 19. Dy sale ney 
3 Hermitage, Cat. 1807. 4 Aesch. Eum. 1. 


392 Dionysos | [CH. 


perhaps not quite certain which is regarded as the first comer, 
but the balance is in favour of Dionysos as the sanctuary is 
already peopled with his worshippers. His dress has something 
of Oriental splendour about it as compared with the Hellenic 
simplicity of Apollo. Each carries his characteristic wand, Apollo 
a branch of bay, Dionysos a thyrsos.’ 

In this vase-painting, which dates about the beginning of the 
fourth century B.C., all is peace and harmony and clasped hands. 
The Delphic priesthood were past masters in the art of glossing 
over awkward passages in the history of theology. Apollo had to 
fight with the ancient mantic serpent of Gaia and slay it before 
he could take possession, and we may be very sure that at one 
time or another there was a struggle between the followers of 
Apollo and the followers of Dionysos. Over this past which was 
not for edification a decent veil was drawn’. 

A religion which conquered Delphi practically conquered the 
whole Greek world. It was probably at Delphi, no less than at 
Athens, that the work of reforming, modifying, adapting the rude 
Thracian worship was effected, a process necessary to commend 
the new cult to the favour of civilized Greece. If then we can 
establish the historical actuality of the Thyiads at Delphi we 
need not hesitate to believe that they, or their counterparts, 
existed in the worship of Dionysos elsewhere. 


Pausanias? when he was at Panopeus was puzzled to know 
why Homer spoke of the ‘fair dancing grounds’ of the place. The 
reason he says was explained to him by the women whom the 
Athenians call Thyiades. He adds, that there may be no mistake, 
‘these Thyiads are Attic women who go every other year with 
the Delphian women to Parnassos and there hold orgies in honour 
of Dionysos. On their way they stopped to dance at Panopeus, 
hence Homer’s epithet.’ Of course this college of sacred women, 
these Thyiades, were provided with an eponymous ancestress, Thyia. 
She is mythological. Pausanias* says in discussing the origin of 


1 See Dr Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, p. 223. The same theological 
euphemism is observable in the Hymn to Dionysos recently discovered at Delphi 
and which will be discussed later (p. 417). Here there is a manifest attempt to 
fuse the worship of Apollo and Dionysos. Dionysos even adopts the characteristic 
Apolline title of Paean. 

pg Keio So Perk iOw ae 





vill | The Maenads 393 


Delphi that ‘some would have it that there was a man called 
Castalius, an aboriginal, who had a daughter Thyia, and that she 
was the first priestess of Dionysos and held orgies in honour of 
the god, and they say that afterwards all women who were mad 
in honour of Dionysos have been called Thyiades after her’ (6cau 
T® Avovicw paivovtar Ouiddas xareicbai pacw io avOperor). 
If ‘those who are mad in honour of Dionysos’ are not substantially 
Maenads, it is hard to say what they are. It is fortunate that 
Pausanias saw and spoke to these women or else his statement? 
that they raved upon the topmost peaks of Parnassos in honour of 
Dionysos and Apollo would have been explained away as mere 
mythology. 

Plutarch was a priest in his own Chaeronea and intimately 
acquainted with the ritual of Delphi, and a great friend of his, 
Klea, was president (apynyos) of the Thyiades at Delphi*. He 
mentions them more than once. In writing to Favorinus*® on 
‘the First Principle of Cold’ he argues that cold has its own 
special and proper qualities, density, stability, rigidity, and gives 
as an instance the cold of a winter’s night out on Parnassos. 
‘You have heard yourself at Delphi how the people who went up 
Parnassos to bring help to the Thyiades were overtaken by a 
violent gale with snow, and their coats were frozen as hard as 
wood, so that when they were stretched out they crumbled and 
fell to bits.’ The crumbling coats sound apocryphal, but the 
Thyiades out in the cold are quite real. You do not face a 
mountain snow-storm to succour the mythological ‘spirits of the 
spring.’ 

It may have been from his friend Klea that Plutarch learnt the 
pleasant story of the Thyiades and the women of Phocis, which 
he records in his treatise on the ‘ Virtues of Women‘.’ ‘When the 
tyrants of Phocis had taken Delphi and undertook against them 
what was known as the Sacred War, the women who attended 
Dionysos whom they call Thyiades being distraught wandered out 
of their way and came without knowing it to Amphissa. And 

LE es Gb ie 

2 De Is. et Os. 35. Herodotus (vu. 178) mentions an altar of the winds at Delphi 
in a place called Thyia, which was the temenos of the heroine, who may herself have 
been a raging wind. The same precinct, we know from an inscription found at 
Delphi, was called Thyiai. See E. Bourguet, Wélanges Perrot, p. 25. 


® Plut. de prin. frig. xviu. 
4 Plut. de mul. virt. x11. 


394 Dionysos [ CH. 


being very weary and not yet having come to their right mind 

they flung themselves down in the agora and fell asleep anyhow 

where they lay. And the women of Amphissa were afraid lest, as 

their city had made an alliance with the Phocians and the place 

was full of the soldiery of the tyrants, the Thyiades might suffer 

some harm. And they left their houses and ran to the agora and 

made a ring in silence round them and stood there without dis- 

turbing them as they slept, and when they woke up they severally 

tended them and brought them food and finally got leave from 

their husbands to set them on their way in safety as far as the 

mountains.’ These Thyiades are the historical counterparts of the 

Maenads of countless vases and bas-reliefs, the same mad revelry, 

the same utter exhaustion and prostrate sleep. They are the 
same too as the Bacchant Women of Euripides! on the slopes of 
Cithaeron : 


‘There, beneath the trees 
Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease 
In the forest, one half sinking on a bed 
Of deep pine greenery, one with careless head 
Amid the fallen oak-leaves,’ 


In the reverence shown by the women of Amphissa we see 
that though the Thyiades were real women they were something 
more than real. This brings us to another of the cultus titles 
enumerated by Timotheos, ‘ Phoibad.’ Phoibas is the female cor- 
relative of Phoebus, a title we are apt to associate exclusively 
with Apollo. Apollo, Liddell and Scott say, was called Phoebus 
because of the purity and radiant beauty of youth. The epithet 
has more to do with purity than with radiant beauty; if with 
beauty at all it is ‘the beauty of holiness.’ Plutarch in discussing 
this title of Apollo makes the following interesting statement? : 
‘The ancients, it seems to me, called everything that was pure and 
sanctified phoebic as the Thessalians still, I believe, say of their 
priests when they are living in seclusion apart on certain pre- 
scribed days that they are living phoebically.’ The meaning of 
this passage, which is practically untranslateable, is clear. The 
root of the word Phoebus meant ‘in a condition of ceremonial 
purity, holy in a ritual sense, and as such specially inspired by 

1 Eur. Bacch. 683. 

2 Plut. de Ei apud Delph, xx. 1 PotBov 5é€ 54 mov 7rd Kabapdy Kal ayvdv ol 


mahatol rav wvouatov ws re Oeaoadol rods lepéas év Tals droppdow hudpas avrods éd’ 
éavray &&w diarpiBovras oluar porBovouetcOa, see J.H.S, x1x, p. 241, 


¥ 


‘ 
) 


4 


Vur | The Maenads 395 


and under the protection of the god, under a taboo. Apollo 
probably took over his title of Phoebus from the old order of 
women divinities to whom he succeeded. Third in order of 
succession after Gaia and Themis’: 

‘Another Titaness, daughter of Earth, 

Phoebe, possessed it, and for birthday gift 

To Phoebus gave it, and he took her name.’ 

Apollo, we may be sure, did not get his birthday gift without 
substantial concessions. He took the name of the ancient Phoebe, 
daughter of earth, nay more he was forced, woman-hater as he 
always was, to utter his oracles through the mouth of a raving 
woman-priestess, a Phoibas. Herodotus in the passage already 
quoted (p. 370) justly observed that in the remote land of the 
Bessi as at Delphi oracular utterance was by the mouth of a 
priestess. Kassandra was another of these women-prophetesses of 
Gaia. She prophesied at the altar-omphalos of Thymbrae, a 
shrine Apollo took over as he took Delphi®. Her frenzy against 
Apollo is more than the bitterness of maiden betrayed; it is the 
wrath of the prophetess of the old order discredited, despoiled 
by the new; she breaks her wand and rends her fillets and 
cries? : 


‘Lo now the seer the seeress hath undone.’ 


The priestess at Delphi, though in intent a Phoibas, was 
called the Pythia, but the official name of the priestess Kassandra 
was, we know, Phoibas?: y 


‘The Phoibas whom the Phrygians call Kassandra,’ 


and the title, ‘she who is ceremonially pure,’ lends a bitter irony 
to Hecuba’s words of shame. 

The word ‘Phoibades is never, so far as I know, actually applied 
to definite Bacchantes, though I believe its use at Delphi to be 
due to Dionysiac influence, but another epithet Potniades points 


1 Aesch. Lum. 6. 

2 On a curious ‘Tyrrhenian’ amphora (Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder 220), 
the scene of the slaying of Troilos is represented. This took place according to 
tradition in the Thymbraean sanctuary. The sanctuary is indicated by a regular 
omphalos covered by a fillet and against it is inscribed Bwuds. 

3 Aesch. Ag. 1275. 

* Eur, Hee. 827 

N PoBas nv Kadodor Kacodvipay Ppvyes. 


396 Dionysos [cH. 


the same way. In the Bacchae!, when the messenger returns 
from Cithaeron, he says to Pentheus: 


‘I have seen the wild white women there, O king, 
Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now 
From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how 
They work strange deeds.’ 

The ‘ wild white women’ are in a hieratic state of holy mad- 
ness, hence their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius? has a 
curious note on the verb with which ‘ Potniades’ is connected. He 
says its normal use was to express a state in which a woman 
‘suffered something and entreated a goddess’ and ‘if any one 
used the word of a man he was inaccurate.’ By ‘suffermg some- 
thing’ he can only mean that she was possessed by the goddess 
(€vOeos or Katoxos), and he may have the Maenads and kindred 
worshippers in his mind. Madness could be caused by the Mother 
of the gods or by Dionysos, in fact by any orgiastic divinity. 


It may possibly be objected that Maenads are not the same 
as either Thyiades or Phoibades. My point is that they are. 
The substantial basis of the conception is the actual women- 
worshippers of the god; out of these were later created his 
mythical attendants. Such is the natural order of mythological 
genesis. Diodorus* like most modern mythologists inverts this 
natural sequence, and his inversion is instructive. In describing 
the triumphal return of Dionysos from India he says: ‘And the 
Boeotians and the other Greeks and the Thracians in memory of 
the Indian expedition instituted the biennial sacrifices to Dionysos 
and they hold that at these intervals the god makes his epiphanies 
to mortals. Hence in many towns of Greece every alternate 
year Bacchanalian assemblies of women come together and it is 
customary for maidens to carry the thyrsos and to revel together 
to the honour and glory of the god, and the married women 
worship the god in organized bands and they revel, and in every 


1 Kur, Bacch. 664 
Baxxas torviddas elovdwv, al rhode yijs 
olatpotot NeuKov K@Aov eENKdvTLCaY. 
Mr Murray’s translation preserves the twofold connotation of the word, purity and 
inspired madness. | 
2 Phot. Bibl. v. 533” érc 7d worvidoOar Kupiwrepov éml yuvatkas rarreral mynow bray — 
kakov Te waoxy Kal Ondetav ikere’n Oedy. morviwmevoy dé dvdpa av Tis elry auaprave. 


3 Diod. tv. 3. 


vit | The Maenads 397 


way celebrate the presence of Dionysos in imitation of the 
Maenads who from of old, it was said, constantly attended the 
god.’ Diodorus is an excellent instance of mistaken mytho- 
logizing. Mythology invents a reason for a fact, does not base 
a fact on a fancy. 

It is not denied for a moment that the Maenads becume 

mythical. When Sophocles sings! : 

‘Footless, sacred, shadowy thicket, where a myriad berries grow, 
Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither wind of the winter blow, 
Where the Reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs will go,’ 

we are not in this world, and his nursing nymphs are ‘ goddesses’ ; 
but they are goddesses fashioned here as always in the image of 
man who made them. 


The difficulty and the discrepancy of opinion as to the reality 
of the Maenads are due mainly to a misunderstanding about words. 
Maenad is to us a proper name, a fixed and crystallized personality; 
so is Thyiad, but in the beginning it was not so. Maenad is the 
Mad One, Thyiad the Rushing Distraught One or something of 
that kind, anyhow an adjectival epithet. Mad One, Distraught 
One, Pure One are simply ways of describing a woman under the 
influence of a god, of Dionysos. Thyiad and Phoibad obtained as 
cultus names, Maenad tended to go over to mythology. Perhaps™ 
naturally so; when a people becomes highly civilized madness is 
apt not to seem, save to poets and philosophers, the divine thing 


it really is, so they tend to drop the mad epithet and the colour- ) ') 


less Thyiad becomes more and more a proper name. 

Still Maenad, as a name of actual priestly women, was not 
wholly lost. An inscription® of the date of Hadrian, found in 
Magnesia and now in the Tschinli Kiosk at Constantinople, gives 
curious evidence. This inscription recounts a little miracle-story. 
A plane tree was shattered by a storm, inside it was found an 
image of Dionysos*. Seers were promptly sent to Delphi to ask 
what was to be done. The answer was, as might be expected, 


1 Qed. Col. 670, trans. by Mr D. S. MacColl. 

2 First published by Kondolleon, Ath. Witt. xv. (1890) p. 330, discussed by 
E. Maass, Hermes xxvi. (1891) p. 178, and S. Reinach, Rev. des Htudes grecques 
m1. (1890) p. 349, and O. Kern, Beitriige zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie 
und Religion, Berlin 1895. 

3 adetdpuua Acovicou. 


398 Dionysos [CH. 


the Magnesians had neglected to build ‘fair wrought temples’ to 
Dionysos; they must repair their fault. To do this properly they 
must send to Thebes and thence obtain three Maenads of the 
family of Kadmean Ino’. These would give to the Magnesians 
orgies and right customs. They went to Thebes and brought 
back three ‘Maenads’ whose names are given, Kosko, Baubo and 
Thettale; and they came and founded three thiasoi or sacred 
~ guilds in three parts of the city. The inscription is of course 
late; Baubo and Kosko are probably Orphic, but the main issue 
is clear: in the time of Hadrian at least three actual women of a 
particular family were called ‘ Maenads.’ 

We are so possessed by a set of conceptions based on Periclean 
Athens, by ideas of law and order and reason and limit, that we 
are apt to dismiss as ‘mythological’ whatever does not fit into our 


stereotyped picture. The husbands and brothers of the women of ~ 


historical days would not, we are told, have allowed their women 
to rave upon the mountains; it is unthinkable taken in conjunction 
with the strict oriental seclusion of the Periclean woman. That 
any woman might at any moment assume the liberty of a Maenad 
is certainly unlikely, but much is borne even by husbands and 
brothers when sanctioned by religious tradition. The men even 
of Macedonia, where manners were doubtless ruder, did not like 
the practice of Bacchic orgies. Bacchus came emphatically not to 
bring peace. Plutarch? conjectures that these Bacchic orgies had 
much to do with the strained relations between the father and 
“mother of Alexander the Great. A snake had been seen lying by 
the side of Olympias and Philip feared she was practising en- 
chantments, or worse, that the snake was the vehicle of a god. 
Another and probably the right explanation of the presence of 
the snake was, as Plutarch tells us, that ‘all the women of that 
country had been from ancient days under the dominion of Orphie 
rites and Dionysiac orgies, and that they were called Klodones and 
Mimallones because in many respects they imitated the Edonian 
and Thracian women round about Haemus, from whom the Greek 
word Opnoxevery seems to come, a word which is applied to 
excessive and overdone ceremonials. Now Olympias was more 
1 dpa AdBynre 
Mawadas ai yevers Hivods dro Kadunelys. 


at 6° biv Sdoover Kal dpyia Kal vouim’ éoOda. 
2 Plut. Vit. Alex. 2. 


vill | The Maenads 399 


zealous than all the rest and carried out these rites of possession 
and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion and introduced huge tame 
serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept creeping out 
of the ivy and the mystic likna and twining themselves round the 
thyrsoi of the women and their garlands, and frightening the men 
out of their senses.’ 
However much the Macedonian men disliked these orgies, they 
were clearly too frightened to put a stop to them. The women 
were possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle. Scenes such 




















Fie. 125. 


as those described by Plutarch as actually taking place in Mace- 
donia are abundantly figured on vases. The beautiful raging 
Maenad in fig. 125 from the centre of a cylix with white ground 


400 | Dionysos [ CH. 


at Munich! is a fine example. She wears the typical Maenad 
garb, the fawn-skin over her regular drapery; she carries the 
thyrsos, she carries in fact the whole gear (cxevn) of Dionysos. 
When Pentheus would counterfeit a Bacchant he is attired just 
so; he wears the long trailing chiton and over it the dappled fawn- 
skin, his hair flows loose, in his hand is the thyrsos. For snood 
(uitpa) in her hair the Maenad has twined a great snake. 
Another Maenad? is shown in fig. 126. She is characterized only 





Fie. 126. 


by the two snakes she holds in her hand. But for her long full 
drapery she might be an Erinys. 

The snakes emerging from the sacred cistae are illustrated 
by the class of coins? known as cistophoroi, a specimen of which 


RAS < bh | 
ST < weit 

( GOL fs 

{> SDKs mF 


wee \ Ca 
ey SGI 


Fie, 127. 


is reproduced in fig. 127. These coins, of which the type is 
uniform, originated, according to Dr Imhoof, in Ephesus a little 


' Munich. Jahn, Cat. 382. Greek Vase Paintings, J. E. Harrison and D. S. 
MacColl, pl. xv. Baumeister, Ab. 928. 

* J.H.S. x1x. p. 220, fig. 6. 

3 Head, Hist. Num. p. 461, fig. 287. 


—- 


vir] The Maenads 401 


before B.c, 200, and spread through all the dominions of Attalos 
the First. They illustrate a phase of Dionysos worship in Asia 
Minor closely akin to that of Macedonia. 
Macedonia is not Athens, but the reforms of Epimenides allow 
us to divine that-Athenian brothers and husbands also had their 
difficulties. Plutarch? again is our informant. Athens was beset 
_ by superstitious fears and strange appearances. They sent to 
Crete for Epimenides, a man beloved of the gods and skilled in 
the technicalities of religion, especially as regards enthusiastic and 
mystic rites. He and Solon made friends and the gist of his 
religious reforms was this; ‘he simplified their religious rites, and 
made the ceremonies of mourning milder, introducing certain forms 
of sacrifice into their funeral solemnities and abolishing the cruel 
and barbarous elements to which the women were addicted. But 
most important of all, by lustrations and expiations and the found- 
ings of worships he hallowed and consecrated the city and made 
it subserve justice and be more inclined to unity” The passage is 
certainly not as explicit as could be wished, but the words used— 
Katopytacas and cafoo.wocas—and the fact that Epimenides was 
an expert in ecstatic rites, that they gave him the name of the 
new Koures, the special attention paid to the rites of women, 
though they are mentioned in relation to funerals, make it fairly 
clear that some of the barbarous excesses were connected with 
Bacchic orgies. This becomes more probable when we remember 
that many of Solon’s own enactments were directed against the 
excesses of women. ‘He regulated,’ Plutarch’ tells us, ‘the out- 
goings of women, their funeral lamentations and their festivals, 
forbidding by law all disorder and excess.’ Among these dreary 
regulations comes the characteristically modern touch that they 
are not to go out at night ‘except im a carriage and with a light 
before them.’ It was the going out at night that Pentheus could 
not bear. When he would know what were the rites of Dio- 
nysos he asks the god: 


‘P. Hew is this worship held, by night or day ? 
D. Most oft by night, tis a majestic thing 
The Darkness. 
P: Ha, with women worshipping ? 
"Tis craft and rottenness.’ 


1 Plut, Vit. Sol. xm. Epimenides is as it were a historical Orpheus. Coming 
from Crete, he, like Orpheus (p. 460), modified Dionysiac ritual. 
2 Plut.| Vit. Sol. xx1. 3 Kur. Bacch. 485. 


H. 26 


~ 


402 Dionysos [ CH. 


Dionysos LIKNITES. 


The Maenads then are the frenzied sanctified women who are 
devoted to the worship of Dionysos. But they are something 
more; they tend the god as well as suffer his inspiration. When 
first we catch sight of them in Homer (p. 368) they are his 
‘nurses’ (ri@nvat). One of the lost plays of Aeschylus bore the 
title ‘Rearer of Dionysos, and Sophocles’, here as so often nispine 
by Homer, makes his chorus sing : 


‘There the reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs doth go,’ 


In Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles, though Dionysos has 
his goddess nurses, he is himself no nursling. A child no longer, 
he revels with them as coevals. Mythology has half forgotten the 
ritual from which it sprang. Fortunately Plutarch? has left us 
an account, inadequate but still significant, of the actual ritual of 
the Thyiades*, and from it we learn that they worshipped and 
tended no full-grown god, but a baby in his cradle. 

Plutarch is speaking of the identity of Osiris and Dionysos, 
both being embodiments according to him of the ‘moist principle.’ 
Te You, Klea,’ he says, ‘if any one, should know that Osiris is the 
_ same as Dionysos, you who are leader of the Thyiades at Delphi 
and were initiated by your father and mother into the rites of 
Osiris. After pointing out various analogies, he adds:j‘ For the 
Egyptians, as has been said, point out tombs of Osiris in many 
places, and the Delphians hold that they possess the relics of 
Dionysos buried by the side of their oracular shrine; the Hosioi 
make a secret sacrifice in the sacred precinct of Apollo when the 
Thyiades raise up Liknites. It will later (p. 483) be seen that 
Dionysos was represented in’ ritual as slain and dismembered ; 
from this passage it is clear that there was some sort of resur- 
rection of the god, a new birth as a little child. Liknites can be 
none other than the babe in the cradle. Hesychius in commenting 
on the word Liknites says: ‘a title of Dionysos from the cradle in 
which they put children to sleep.’ In primitive agricultural days, 


1 Qed. Col. 674, see p. 369. 
2 De Isid. et Os. xxxv. kai Ovovow ol “Ooror Ovolay dmébppnrov év Tw lepw@ rod 
?AmodAAwvos bray al Ouddes éyelpwor Tov Acxvirny. 
3 The verb dulw is used of the excited beating of the heart under stronz emotion, 
e.g. Ap. Rhod. 11. 754 
muxva O€ ol Kpadln ornbéwv évroobey Eber, 





evr Dionysos Liknites 403 


the liknon, a shovel-shaped basket, served three purposes: it was a 
‘fan’ with which to winnow grain, it was a basket to hold grain 
or fruit or sacred objects, it was a cradle for a baby. The various 
forms of likna and the beautiful mysticism that gathered round 


the cradle and the winnowing fan, will be considered when Orphic 


ceremonial is discussed (p. 518). For the present it is enough 
to note that the ceremony of raising or waking Liknites marks 


clearly the worship of a child-god. 


The worship by women of Liknites, of the child in the cradle, 
reflects a primitive stage of society, a time when the main realized 
function of woman was motherhood and the more civilized, less 
elemental, function of wedded wife was scarcely adventured. It is 
at once a cardinal point and a primary note in the mythology of 
Dionysos that he is the son of his mother. The religion of the 
Mother and the Daughter is already familiar (p. 271); it reflected, 


| as has been seen, primarily not so much the relations of mother 


and daughter as the two stages of woman’s life, woman as maid, 
and woman as mother. If we are to have the relation of parent 
and child mirrored in mythology, assuredly the closest relation 
is not that even of mother and daughter but of mother and son. 
Father and son, Zeus and Apollo, reflect a still further advance 


| in civilization. 


Before leaving the Thyiades, it is important to note that they 
had a cult not only of Liknites, the child in the cradle, but of the 
mother who bore him, Semele, and this too at Delphi. Plutarch 
is again our authority. In his Greek Questions’, he treats of the 
three great enneateric festivals of Delphi, the Stepterion, Herois 
and Charila. Of the Herois he says: ‘Its inner meaning is for 
the most part mystical as is known to the Thyiades, but from the 
rites that are openly performed one may conjecture that it is a 


Return of Semele.’ Plutarch’s conjecture was undoubtedly right. 


The Herois was a resurrection festival, with rites of Return and 
Uprising, such as have been already (p. 276) fully discussed in 
relation to Demeter and Kore. 

The relation of Dionysos to his father Zeus was slight and 
artificial. He is, as aforesaid, essentially the son of his mother, 


1 Plut. Q. Gr. xit. ris 6¢ “Hpwidos Ta mrelora wvoTixoy exer Nbyov by icacw ai 
Ouddes, ex 5€ Ta Spwuevwr havepds Leuédns ay Tis dvaywynhv elkdcece. 


26—2 


404 _ Dionysos [ CH. 


‘child of Semele’? The meaning of the fatherhood of Zeus and 
the strange hieratic legend of the double birth will be discussed 
later: the question must first be asked ‘ Who is Semele ?’ 


Dionysos SON OF SEMELE. 


Dionysos, we have seen, was a Thracian; if his mother can be 
shown to be Thracian too, each will confirm the other. The 
certain remains of the Phrygio-Thracian tongue are but scanty, 
happily however they suffice for the certain interpretation of the 
name Semele. 

Prof. Ramsay in his Phrygian explorations* has brought to 
light a number of inscriptions from tombs which run after this 
fashion : 

bn duos Cepeda. 
pe CepeAw Ke Oeos. 
deos Ke Cepu(eho). 
pe Cepeda. 

These various permutations and combinations are followed by 
a curse formulary as follows: vos ceywouv Kvovpavet Kakovy addaxet 
ETUTTETUK HUEVOS ELTOU, which is Ehrygian for ds TovUT@ (TO) uvnwaTe 
Kakov éTéOnke UToKatdpatos éotw, ‘Cursed be he that does any 
damage to this tomb.’ The inscriptions which all date after the 
Christian era belong to a time when the well-to-do classes spoke 
and wrote Greek, but, in the case of a curse, 1t was well to couch 
your inscription in a tongue understanded of the people. je and 
6n would appear to be affirmative curse particles; me has for 
cognates wd, wnv and possibly wév, as well as the Latin me in me 
FHercle, me Dius Fidius. 6&y is cognate not only to the ordinary 
affirmative Greek 67 but also to the de of the Latin oath e-de-pol. 
The divinities sworn by remain to be considered. 67 édc@s can 
scarcely be other than vy Ata, ‘by Zeus. feuedw at once brings 


1 Kur. Bacch. 375 Tov Bpdpwov 


Tov Dewédas. 

v. 580 6 Deuérdas, 
6 Atos mats. 

v. 278 6 Leuéd\ns ydvos. 


? Ramsay, Journal of Asiatic Soc. xv. 1883, pp. 120 ff., and Latischew, Fiir 
vergleichende Sprachforschung, vol. xxvii. pp. 381 ff. The inscriptions are explained 
and discussed in relation to Semele by Dr Paul Kretschmer, ‘Semele und Dionysos,’ 


in Aus der Anomia (Berlin 1890), and to him I owe entirely the view adopted in the 
text. 


vit | Dionysos Son of Semele 405 


Semele to mind. But who and what is Semele? Phrygian and 
Thracian are now admitted to belong to the Indo-European family 
of languages, and a conjoint consonantal characteristic of the two 
is that they replace the palatals g and gh (Greek y and y) by a 
spirant; this spirant the Greeks rendered indifferently by their 
nearest equivalents and o. The Phrygian fewedw is the Greek 
y7 (earth) appearing in nasalized form as yapal, yOapanros, yOar, 
in Latin as humus, humilis, homo, in Sclavonic, to quote only a 
familiar and convincing instance, in Nova Zembla, ‘new earth’ 
The Greek form y7 looks remote but we have also its nasalized 
form Xapwvy (Lit. Zemyna). At Elis Pausanias! saw, opposite the 
place where the umpires stood, an altar of white marble. On 
that altar sat the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, to behold the 
Olympic games. ‘She of the Ground’ was probably at Olympia 
long before the coming of Zeus. 


Semele, mother of Dionysos, is the Earth. This the vase- 
painter knew well. In dealing with the Earth-Mother (p. 276) a 
number of vase-paintings have been considered, in which Kore, the 











Fic, 128. 


earth in her young form as maiden, has been seen represented as 
rising out of the actual earth she really is. To these as counter- 
part must now be added the curious vase-painting in fig. 128, now 


1 Pe viz 20.9. 


406 Dionysos [ CH. 


in the Hope collection at Deep-dene’. Out of the earth-mound 
rises a youthful figure, a male Kore; he holds a sceptre as king 
and is welcomed, or rather heralded, by a little winged Nike. 
His worshippers await him: a Maenad with thyrsos and tray of 
offerings to the right, a Satyr also with thyrsos to the left. The 
rising figure can be none other than the child of Semele, the 
earth-Dionysos himself. It is rash, I think, to give the rising god 
any special name, to call him Iacchos or Brimos; all we can be 
sure that the vase-painter meant was that the god.is earth-born. 
The same notion comes clearly out in the second design in 
fig. 129 from a kalpis in the British Museum*. Here the familiar . 
type® of the birth of Erichthonios from the earth is taken over < 
and adapted to the birth of Dionysos. The vase-painter thus in 





Fie. 129. 


instructive fashion assimilates the immigrant stranger to his own 
heroic mythology. Ge is rising from the earth; she presents, not 
Erichthonios, but another sacred child to a foster-mother, Athene. 
It is practically certain that the child is Dionysos, not Erichthonios, 


1 T regret to be obliged to reproduce the publication of Tischbein (Greek Vases 1. 
39). As regards style it is obviously inadequate. The vase has been examined by 
Mr Cecil Smith (Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, p. 120, note 17) and the reproduction of 
Tischbein is pronounced by him to be as regards subject-matter substantially 
correct. 

2 B.M. Cat. vol. mr. © 182, ef. C. Robert, <Archiologische Miihrchen 161. 
Dr Robert explains the vase as the birth of Dionysos from the well-nymph Dirce, 
but vase-paintings offer no analogy to the representation of a well-nymph as 
a figure rising from the ground, 

8 Cf. Myth. and Mon. Anc, Athens, p. Xxxix. 





Vir | Dionysos Son of Semele 407 


for the maiden who in such familiar fashion leans on the shoulder 
of Zeus in inscribed ‘Wine-bloom, Oinanthe. Zeus himself with his 
thunderbolt is a reminiscence of the thunder-smitten birth. On 
authentic representations of the birth of Erichthonios, Hephaistos, 
his putative father, is present, not Zeus. As in fig. 128 the new- 
born hero is welcomed by a winged Victory, who brings a taenia 
to crown him. It is clear that the vase-painter wants to make 
the new-born child as Athenian as possible, almost to substitute 
him for the autochthonous Erichthonios; he is welcomed and 
received not by Satyrs and Maenads, his own worshippers and 
kinsfolk, but by his new relations, Athene and Athenian Victory. 

~ The third vase-painting in fig. 130 from a cylix in the Museum ~ 
at Naples! is a much earlier piece of work. It dates about the 






OF 


Ke 


Fic. 130. 


middle of the sixth century, and is free from any specifically 
Athenian influence. Out of the ground rise two great busts 
inscribed severally Avovyucos (Dionysos) and YeuérAn (Semele). 
Even without the inscriptions there could be no doubt as to 
Dionysos. The vase-painter in his primitive eager fashion makes 
assurance doubly sure. The god holds aloft with pardonable 
pride his characteristic high-handled wine-cup, the kantharos; 
behind him and Semele a great vine is growing, up one side of 
which a Satyr is clambering. Dionysos is not Liknites here; he 


1 Heydemann, Cat. St Angelo Coll. 172. Gerhard, Ges. Abh. Taf. txvur. The 
authenticity of the inscriptions has been questioned. I examined them last year in 
the Naples Museum and see no ground for suspicion. 


408 Dionysos [ OH. 


is in the full bloom of his youth, not elderly though bearded, 
coeval with fair Semele. 


At Thebes the legend of the birth of Dionysos took on a 
special form. He is not only son of Semele, of Earth!, but son of 
Semele as Keraunia, Earth the thunder-smitten. 

This aspect of Semele as Keraunia is familiar im classical 
literature. Sophocles? has ‘thou and thy mother, she of the 
thunder. To Euripides? in the Hippolytus Semele thunder- 
smitten is the stuff of which is made perhaps the most splendid 
poetry he ever wrote: 


‘O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall 
That Dirce’s wells run under ; 
Ye know the Cyprian’s fleet foot-fall, 
Ye saw the heavens round her flare 
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair 
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there 
The Bride of the bladed thunder : 
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air 
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder,’ 


And this splendid poetry is based, it seems, not merely on 
mythology but on a local cult, a cult of thunder and a place 
thunder-smitten. The prologue* of the Bacchae, spoken by 
Dionysos, opens thus, with a description of the sanctuary of 
Semele: 


‘Behold god’s son is come unto this land 
Of Thebes, even I, Dionysos, whom the brand 
Of heaven’s hot splendour lit to life, when she 
Who bore me, Cadmus’ daughter Semele, 
Died here. So, changed in shape from god to man, 
I walk again by Dirce’s stream, and scan 
Ismenus’ shore. There by the castle side 
I see her place, the Tomb of the Lightning’s Bride, 
The wreck of smouldering chambers and the great 
Faint wreaths of fire undying, as the hate 
Dies not that Hera held for Semele. 
Ay Cadmus hath done well: in purity 
He keeps this place apart, inviolate 
His daughter’s sanctuary, and I have set 
My green and clustered vines to robe it round.’ 


Nor again is this merely the effective scenic setting of a play. 


1 An inscription of the 5th century B.c. recently discovered shows that at 
Thebes there was an actual sanctuary of Earth. It runs as follows: iapdy Tés 
Maxalpas TeXeoodpépo. The titles udxacpa and reXeoPdpos are applied to Ge in the 
Orphic Hymn (xxvi. 1 and 10). See Bull. de Corr. Hell. 1901, p. 363. 

* Soph. Ant. 1139. ®° Eur. Hipp. 555. 4 Kur. Bacch. 1. 





VII | Semele as Keraunia 409 


Any place that was struck by lightning was regarded as specially 
sacred’. If the place was the tomb of a local heroine there was 
a double sanctity. Such a tomb there unquestionably was at 
Thebes. Pausanias? asserts the fact though he does not state 
that he actually saw the tomb: ‘There are also the ruins of the 
house of Lycus and Semele’s monument. Primarily of course 
the sanctity of a thunder-smitten place was more of the nature of 
a taboo than of consecration in our sense of the word. It would 
lend itself easily to a legend of judgment on a heroine or of a 
divine Epiphany. The figure of the great Earth-goddess Semele 
faded before the splendour of Zeus. 

Possibly the cult of these thunder-smitten places may serve to 
answer a question asked by Plutarch*—‘ Who among the Boeotians 
are the Psoloeis (Smoky Ones) and who the Aioleiai?’ Plutarch 
tells a confused story of the daughters of Minyas who went mad 
with desire for human flesh and slew the child of one of them. 
The dreadful deed was commemorated by a ‘ flight ceremony’ that 
formed part of the Agrionia, in which the priest of Dionysos 
pursued with a sword the women of the clan in which the men 
were called Psoloeis and the women Aioleiai, and if he caught 
one, had leave to slay her. Zoilos, a priest in the time of Plutarch, 
actually availed himself of the permission. Bad luck followed. 
Zoilos sickened and died, and the priesthood ceased to be hereditary 
and became elective. The story is very obscure, but Lydus* in 
discussing thunderbolts says there are two kinds, the one is swift 
and rarefied (waves) and fiery and is called apy7s, the other is 
slow and smoky and is called yodoes. The family of the Smoky 
Ones may have been worshippers of the smoky kind of thunder- 
bolt. 

Be this as it may, the cult and mythology of Dionysos are 
haunted by reminiscences of lightning and sudden fiery apparitions 
that are probably not merely poetical but primitive. In the 
Bacchae not only is Dionysos fire-born and attended by the light 
of torches, but his Epiphany is marked by a manifest thunder- 


1 Such places were, if we may trust the Htymologicon Magnum, called évydiora, 
which at least in popular etymology was believed to mean ‘Places of Advent.’ 
They are thus defined: évnAvo.a Néyerar eis & Kepauvds elo BEBnKev a Kal dvariderat 
At karaBarn Kat N€éyerar dévTa Kai dBara. 

12 Goes TF 3 Plut. Q. Gr. xxxvIltI. 

4 Lydus, de mens. tv. 96. 


410 Dionysos [CH. 


storm, a storm that takes the shape of a resurgence of the flame 
on Semele’s tomb. <A voice is heard": 


‘Unveil the Lightning’s Eye, arouse 
The fire that sleeps, against this house.’ 


And the chorus make answer : 


‘Ah saw ye, marked ye there the flame 
From Semele’s enhallowed sod 
Awaken’d? Yea the Death that came 
Ablaze from heaven of old—the same 
Hot splendour of the shaft of God.’ 
And again on Cithaeron? there is not only the mysterious 
voice and the awful silence, but the manifestation of the pillar 
of fire: 


‘So spake he and there came 
’Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame: 
And silence took the air, and no leaf stirred 
In all the forest dell. Thou hadst not heard 
In that vast silence any wild thing’s cry.’ 

The Epiphany by fire is of course common to many theologies ; 
we have the Burning Bush and the Pentecostal tongues, but it is 
interesting to find that, in far-away Thrace, the favour of Dionysos 
was made manifest by a great light. The evidence comes from 
Aristotle*. He says: ‘There is in the same place (i.e. in Krastonia 
near the district of the Bisaltae) a large and beautiful sanctuary 
of Dionysos, in which it is reported that at the time of the festival 
and the sacrifice, if the god intends to send a good season, a great 
blaze of fire appears, and this is seen by all those whose business 
is in the temenos; but if the god intends a barren season, the light 
does not make its appearance, but there is darkness on the place 
as on other nights.’ It would be vain to ask what natural fact, 
whether of summer lightning or burning bush, caused the belief; 
the essential point is the primitive Epiphany by fire, an Epiphany 
not vengeful but beneficent. 


Dionysos is then the son of an ancient Thracian Earth-goddess, 
Semele, and she is Keraunia, thunder-smitten, in some sense the 
bride, it would seem, of our old sky and thunder-god, a sort of 
Ouranos later effaced by the splendour of the Hellenic Zeus. If 


1 Bur. Bacch. 594. 2 Eur. Bacch. 1082. 
® Aristot. mepl Pauw. 122. 


vut| Semele as Keraunia 411 


some such old nature-god existed as is probable in the far back- 
ground of primitive mythology, the affiliation of Zeus and Dionysos 
would be an easy matter. 

In this connection it is interesting to note that not only Zeus 
himself was associated with the thunder and the lightning, but 
also the ancient ‘ Mother of the Gods.’ Pindar’, who all through 
the third Pythian has in his mind the sore sickness of Hieron, 
not only bethinks him of Cheiron the primitive Healer but also 
sings: 


‘I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban, 
The holy goddess, to whom and to Pan 
Before my gate, all night long, 

The maids do worship with dance and song.’ 


The scholiast tells us how it came that Pindar prayed to the 
Mother for healing. One day while Pindar was teaching a pupil 
on a mountain, possibly Cithaeron itself, ‘there was heard a great 
noise, and a flame of lightning was seen descending, and Pindar 
saw that a stone image of the Mother had come down at their 
feet, and the oracle ordained that he should set up a shrine to 
the Mother. The story is transparent—a thunderstorm, lightning 
and a fallen aerolite, the symbol of the Mother, surely of Keraunia. 
And the Mother, the scholiast further tells us, ‘had power to 
purify from madness.’ She had power to loose as well as to bind. 
In this she was like her son Dionysos. The magical power for 
purification of aerolites and indeed of almost any strange black 
stone is attested by many instances”. Orestes* was purified at 
Trozen: from his madness, mother-sent, by a sacred stone. Most 
curious of all, Porphyry* tells us that Pythagoras when he was in 
Crete met one of the Idaean Dactyls, worshippers of the Mother, 
and was by him purified with a thunderbolt. 

With a mother thunder-smitten, it was not hard for Dionysos 
to become adopted child of the Hellenic Zeus, God of the 
Thunderbolt. Theologians were ready with the myth of the 
double birth. Semele fell into partial discredit, obscured by 
the splendour of the Father. Matriarchy pales before the new 


1 Pind, Pyth. 111. 77 and schol. ad loc. 

2 I have collected and discussed some instances of these in my article 
‘Delphika,’ J.H.S. x1x. 1899, p. 238. 

3 P. vit. 31. 4, and at Gythium, P. 111. 22. 1. 

4 Porph. Vit. Pyth. xvi. 


412 Dionysos [ cH. 


order of patriarchy, and from henceforth the name Dionysos’, 
‘son of Zeus,’ is supreme. 


Dionysos Son OF ZEUS. 


The fatherhood of Zeus is charmingly set forth by the lovely 
little vase-fragment in fig. 131 from 
a red-figured cylix®, found in the ex- 
cavations on the Acropolis and now 
in the National Museum at Athens. 
Zeus with his sceptre holds the infant 
Dithyramb and displays him proudly 
to the other Olympians. Semele is 
ignored, perhaps half forgotten. Dio- 
nysos in the new order is ‘all for the 
father.’ 

The all-important question is 
forced upon us—why did Zeus adopt 
him? Dionysos is the child of the 
Earth-goddess, but why was this par- 
ticular earth-child adopted? Why did 
his worship spread everywhere with Fre. 181. 
irresistible might, overshadowing at 
the end even the cult of his adopted father? Kore too is 
daughter of Earth, she too in awkward fashion was half affiliated 
to Zeus, yet he never takes her in his arms and her cult though 
wide-spread has no militant missionary aspect. 

Zeus holds the infant Dionysos in his arms, and Dionysos 





1 Dr Kretschmer (dus der Anomia p. 23) has shown that in all probability the 
second half of the name Dionysos (-vvcos) means ‘son’ or ‘young man’: it is the 
cognate of Lat. nurus and of Gr. y¥udn, which in the compound xaxdyuudos (Hur. 
Alc. 206, 990) appears in masculine form. On the fragment of an early black- 

figured vase signed by Sophilos, three nymphs appear with the inscription Ndoa 
which seems equivalent to kédpac or yiudae or mapbévo. (A. Mitt. xiv. Taf. i.). 
Aristophanes seems to have vaguely felt or imagined some connection between the 
last half of the word and Nysa, the birthplace of the god, in his Nuvojov Adds 
Atévvcov (Ran. 215) echoed by Apollonius Rhodius in Avs Nuojov via (Arg. tv. 1132). 
Dionysos then is practically either Avoxoupos, a term of wide application, or possibly 
child of the tribe of Dioi (see p. 372). Dr Kretschmer further points out that the 
fluctuation in inscriptions between « and ¢ (Aedyvcos and Acévuaos) is best accounted 
for by Thracian origin, as the Thracians appear to have had a vowel which was 
not exactly either, and was indifferently rendered in Greek by both. Probably 
then, though not certainly, Dionysos brought his name with him from the North. 

2 Jahrbuch des Inst. 1891, Taf. 1. Sufficient fragments of the vase remain to 

show that the scene represented was the presentation of Dionysos to the Olympians. 


Vur | | Dionysos Son of Zeus 413 


holds in his the secret of his strength, the vine with its great 
‘bunch of grapes. But for that bunch of grapes Zeus would never 
have troubled to adopt him. To the popular mind Dionysos was 
always Lord of the Vine, as Athene was Lady of the Olive. It is 
by the guerdon of the grape that his Bacchants appeal to Dirce’: 

‘By his own joy I vow, 

By the grape upon the bough.’ 
It is by his great gift of Wine to sorrowful man that his kingdom 
is established upon earth? : 

‘A god of Heaven is He, 

And born in majesty, 

Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth 
And he loveth constantly 


Her who brings increase, 
The Feeder of children, Peace. 


No grudge hath He of the great, 
No scorn of the mean estate, 
But to all that liveth, his Wine he giveth, 

Griefless, immaculate. 

Only on them that spurn 

Joy may his anger burn.’ 
It is the usual mythological inversion, he of the earth is trans- 
lated to heaven that thence he may descend. 

Dionysos as god of the grape is so familiar that the idea needs 
no emphasis. It is more important to note that the vine as the 
origin of his worship presents certain difficulties. 

It has clearly been seen that Dionysos was a Northerner, a 
Thracian. Wine is not the characteristic drink of the North. Is 
it likely that wine, a drink characteristic to this day of the South, 
is the primitive essence of the worship of a god coming into 
Greece from the North ? 

The answer to this difficulty is an interesting one. The main 
distinguishing factor of the religion of Dionysos is always the cult 
of an intoxicant, but wine is not the only intoxicant, nor in the 
North the most primitive. Evidence is not wanting that the 
cult of the vine-god was superimposed on, affiliated to, in part 
developed out of, a cult that had for its essence the worship of 
an early and northern intoxicant, cereal not vinous. 

To this conclusion I have been led by the consideration of the 
cultus titles of the god. 


1 Eur. Bacch. 535. 2 Eur. Bacch. 416. 


414 Dionysos [ CH. 


Bromios. BRAITES. SABAZIOS. 


Dionysos is a god of many names; he is Bacchos, Baccheus, 
Tacchos, Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazios, Zagreus, Thyoneus, 
Lenaios, Eleuthereus, and the list by no means exhausts his titles. 
A large number of these names are like Lenaios, ‘ He of the Wine- 
Press,’ only descriptive titles; they never emerge to the dignity 
of proper names. Some, like Iacchos and probably Bacchos itself, 
though they ultimately became proper names, were originally only 
cries. Iacchos was a song even down to the time of Aristophanes}, 
and was probably, to begin with, a ritual shout or cry kept up long 
after its meaning was forgotten. Such cries from their vagueness, 
their aptness for repetition, are peculiarly exciting to the religious 
emotions. How many people attach any precise significance to 
the thrice repeated, stately and moving words that form the 
procemium to our own Easter Hymn ? 


‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.’ 


They are a homage beyond articulate speech. Then, as now, 
these excited cries became sacred titles of the worshippers who 
used them: ‘Evian women’ (evvoe yuvaixes) were the ancient and 
more reverent counterpart of our ‘ Hallelujah lasses.’ 

The various titles of the god are of course of considerable use 
in determining his nature, for they all express some phase of 
emotion in the worshipper, and it is of these phases that a god is 
compounded. Certain names seem to cling to certain places. 
Sabazios is Thracian, Zagreus Cretan, Bromios largely Theban, 
Jacchos Athenian. Some of the epithets have unquestionably 
shifted their meaning in the course of time. The Greeks were 
adepts at false etymology, and an excellent instance of this 
is a title of the first importance for our argument, Bromios. 


The title Bromios has to our modern ears a poetical, some- 
what mystical ring*. It never occurs in Homer, nor in Sophocles. 
Pindar and Aeschylus both use it, Euripides often. The poets, 
by their usage, clearly show that they connect the title with the 


1 Ar. Ran. 381. 
? Preller (8rd ed. p. 665) goes so far as to say ‘Bpducos scheint nur poetisches 
Beiwort zu sein.’ 


vii | | Dionysos as Bromios 415 


verb Bpéwa, which means ‘to make a confused sound.’ Pindar in 
a dithyrambic fragment’ says: 
‘We hymn thee Bromios and Him of the loud cry.’ 


The address it may be noted is to the Cadmean Dionysos. 

Sometimes the association is definitely with thunder (@povtn). 
Thus in the second Olympian* we have: 

‘High in Olympus lives for evermore 
She of the delicate hair, 

Semele fair, 

Who died by the thunder’s roar.’ 

Here the title Bromios can scarcely have been remote from 
Pindar’s mind, though he does not care to press the allusion. 
In the Bacchae there seems no consciousness of etymology. The 
titles Dionysos and Bromios come haphazard, but throughout the 
play Dionysos is in some degree a god of thunder as well as 
thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange, confused, 
orgiastic music, music which we know he brought with him from 
the North. 

Strabo* has preserved for us two fragments from the lost 
Edomans of Aeschylus which deal with this music of orgy and 
madness. Aeschylus, he says, speaks in the Hdonians of the 
goddess Kotys and the instruments of her worship, and imme- 
diately introduces the worshippers of Dionysos, thus: 


‘One on the fair-turned pipe fulfils 

His song, with the warble of fingered trills 

The soul to frenzy awakening. 

From another the brazen cymbals ring. 

The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan 
Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown, 
And in deep diapason the shuddering sound 

Of drums, like thunder, beneath the ground.’ 


Of the ‘bull-voiced mimes’ we should have been glad to know 
more details, but the fragment, obscure as it is, leaves at least 
the impression of weird exciting ceremonial, and most of all of 


mysterious music. 
All this must have helped to make of Bromios the god of 


1 Pind. frg. 45 
| Tov Bpomsov tov “EpiBéav te xahéouer. 
2 Pind. Ol. 11. 27 
(wer pev év “Odvprrias atofavoica Bpduy 
Kepauvov Tavuefeipa Deuéda. 


3 Strabo x. p. 470. 


416 Dionysos [ CH. 


sounds and voices; yet it is probable, indeed almost certain, that 
the title had another origin, simpler, less poetical. We owe the 
clue to this primitive meaning to the Emperor Julian. 


Julian in his northern campaign saw and no doubt tasted with 
compunction a wine, made not from the grape but from barley. 
After the fashion of his age he wrote an epigram? to this new, or 
rather very old, Dionysos. From the number of instructive puns it 
contains this epigram is almost untranslateable, but as its evidence 
is for our purpose of paramount importance it may be roughly 
Englished as follows: 


To wine made of barley’. 


‘Who and whence art thou, Dionyse? Now, by the Bacchus true 
Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say—‘Who and what are you?’ 
He smells of nectar like a god, you smack of goats and spelt, 

For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt 
Made you. Your name’s Demetrios, but never Dionyse, 
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.’ 


The emperor makes three very fair puns, as follows: Spowos 
oats, Bpopucos of the thunder; aupoyev wheat-born, rupuyev% fire- 
born; tpdyos goat and tpdyos an inferior kind of wheat, spelt. 


1 Anthol. Pal. 1x. 368 
His olvov ao xptO7js. 
Tis; méOev eis Atdvuce; wa yap Tov adnbéa Baxxov 
ot o° éemiyyvwoKkw: tov Atos oda mévor. 
Keivos véxtap ddwde, av 5é Tpayov’ 7% pa ce KeArol 
T™ jwevin Borptwy tedéav am’ doraxtwr. 
T® ce xpyn Kadéew Anurrpiov, ov Atévucor, 
mupoyev7 addov Kal Bpduov ob Bpdmov. 
The epigram is discussed and the play on rupvyev9, rupoyevA, Bpduos and Bpdcos 
rightly observed by Hehn (Kulturpjlanzen, 6th ed. p. 147), and to his book and 
Schrader’s Reallexicon I am indebted for many references. Hehn misses the 
point of tpayos but it was noted long ago by Couring in the Thesaurus of Stephanos 
(2342 8) s.v. tpdyos. He remarks apropos of the epigram: ‘non hireum sed ex 
olyra et tritico confectum panem.’ See also Dr W. Headlam, Cl. Rev. 1901, p. 23. 
2 Mr Francis Darwin kindly tells me that rpa-yos is said to be a kind of wheat 
known now as triticum amylaeum. It is akin to spelt, triticum spelta, the ancient 
(ela. Bpduos is some form of oats, in modern Greek Bpwuyn. It is of interest to note 
that in the 4th century z.c. Bpduos was an important cereal accounted as more 
wholesome than barley. This is clear from the words of the physician Dieuches : 
ylverac 6é adqurov Kal awd Tod Bpbuov. pptryera 5é oly TO ax’pw wav. dmrowhoceral 
Te kal TplBerar kal épvxerar Kabarep Kal 7d KplOwov dAdirov. TovTo Td agiTov Kpetrrov 
kal ag@uowrepov éore Tod KpOlvov (xai. veter. et clar. medic. Graec. var. opusc. ed. 
F. de Matthaei, Mosquae 1808, p. 39; see Hehn, Kulturp/l. 7th edit. p. 553). By 
the time of Galen it seems to have fallen into comparative disuse, displaced pro- 
bably by the richer cereals. He says (de aliment. facult. 1. 14): rpoph & éor 
imotuylwy obk dvOpmrwy, el uh more.dpa Mmwrrovres EoxaTws avayKkacbelev, éx To’TOU 
rod omépuaros. The modern history of oats presents a close analogy. Displaced 
in the south by the richer wheat it remains the staple food of the northern Scot, 
and is the food of cattle only in the south. 


vt | Dionysos as Braites 417 


The gist of the third pun will be considered more fully at a later 
stage of the argument. For the present it is sufficient to note 
that all three have the same substantial content, there is a 
Dionysos who is not of heaven but of earth. Julian propounds 
as an elegant jest the simple but illuminating mythological truth 
that the title Bromios points to a god born not of the lightning 
and thunder but of an intoxicant made from the cereal Bpopos. 
Bromios is Demetrios, son of Demeter the Corn-Mother, before 
he becomes god of the grape and son by adoption of Olympian 
Zeus. 

Julian is not precise in his discrimination between the various 
edible grasses. His epigram is headed, ‘To wine made of barley 
(xptO7js)’; the god, he says, smacks of spelt (tpdyos), he is wheat- 
born (arupoyevh) and he is of oats (Bpopos). It matters to Julian 
nothing, nor is it to our argument of first importance, of what 
particular cereal this new-old Dionysos is made. The point is 
that it is of some cereal, not of the grape. The god is thus seen 
to be son of Semele, Earth-goddess in her agricultural aspect as 
Demeter, Corn-Mother. We shall later (p. 518) see that he was 
worshipped with service of the winnowing-fan, and we shall 
further see that, when he-of-the-cereal-intoxicant became he-of- 
the-wine-of-grapes, the instrument that had been a winnowing-fan 
became a grape-basket. 


The possibility of this simple origin of Bromios grows when 
we consider another epithet of the god. In the Paean to Dionysos 
recently discovered at Delphi’ there occurs the title hitherto 
unexplained—Braites. The hymn opens thus with a string of 
cultus epithets: 


‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come, 

Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come, 
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring 
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.’ 


Nowhere else does the title Braites occur; but the hymn, as 


1H. Weil, Bull. de Corr. Hell. x1x. p. 401 
[Acip’ dva A]:AipauBe, Baxx’, 
e[Uie Oupon]|pes, Bpat- 
Tad, Bpduc(e), npwalts ixod 
Taicd(e)] iepats év wpars. 
Dr Weil suggests ‘‘ faut-il le rattacher 4 Fpaiw =palw et l’expliquer ‘celui qui frappe 
et qui brise’?” 


H. 27 


418 Dionysos [ CH. 


an actual ritual composition, inscribed and set up at Delphi, is an 
important source. Braites has been explained as the Breaker or 
Striker, but this is scarcely a happy epithet for the Spring-god. 
In the light of Bromios it may be suggested that the epithet is 
connected with the late Latin word braiswm, which means ‘grain 
prepared for the making of the beer brazsum’’ Braites would then 
like Bromios be an epithet derived from a cereal intoxicant. 


An examination of the title Sabazios leads to results more 
certain and satisfactory. The name Sabazios has a more foreign 
sound than Dionysos, even than Bromios. Sabazios was never 
admitted even to the outskirts of Olympus. In the time of 
Demosthenes’ his rites were regarded by the orthodox as foreign, 
outrageous, disreputable. One of the counts in the unmannerly 
attack of Demosthenes on Aeschines is that Aeschines had been 
instructed by his mother in mysteries and rites that were certainly 
those of Sabazios, that having performed various degrading cere- 
monials he ‘led those admirable thiasoi about the streets, they 
being crowned with fennel and poplar, and gesticulated with great 
red snakes, waving them over his head and shouting Euoi Saboi.’ 
The Saboi were the worshippers of Sabazios as the Bacchae of 
Bacchos. Of course Demosthenes is grossly unjust. The cere- 
monies of Sabazios could be closely paralleled by the perfectly 
orthodox ritual of Dionysos, but they passed under another name, 
were not completely canonical, and above all things were still 
realized as foreign. That pious men of good repute might quietly 
worship Sabazios is clear from the account of the ‘Superstitious 
Man’ in Theophrastos*. Against his moral character nothing can 
be urged, but that he was a little over-zealous, and ‘ whenever he 
chanced to see a red snake he would invoke Sabazios.’ 

Down to Christian days the snake was an important feature in 
the cult of Sabazios. Clement and Arnobius* both state that 
one of the ‘tokens’ of the mysteries of Sabazios was ‘the god 
(gliding) through the bosom.’ The snake was of course associated 
also with Dionysos—he may have inherited it from the earlier 
god—but his more characteristic vehicle was the bull. Sabazios 

1 Ducange s.y. braisum: grana ad conficiendam braisum cerevisiam praeparata. 
Dem. de Cor. 313. 


Theophr. Char, Lxxvrt. 
Clem. Al. Protr. 1. Arnob. c. gent. y. p. 170. 


- & bw 


VIL | Dionysos as Sabazios 419 


seems always to have been regarded as more primitive and savage 
than Dionysos. Diodorus!, puzzled by the many forms of Dionysos, 
says: ‘Some people fable that there was another Dionysos very 
much earlier in date than this one, for they allege that there was 
a Dionysos born of Zeus and Persephone, the one called by some 
Sabazios, whose birth and sacrifices and rites they instance as 
celebrated by night and in secret on account of shameless cere- 
monies attending them.’ These last words probably refer to the 
mystic marriage of the god with the initiated (p. 535). 

The symbolism of the snake has already (p. 826) been discussed. 
A god whose vehicle was the snake would find easy affillation in 
Greece, where every dead hero was a snake. 

Sabazios is left unsung by tragic poets, but the realism of 
comedy reflects the popular craze for semi-barbarian worship. 
The temper of Demosthenes was not, if Strabo” be right, character- 
istically Athenian. ‘As in other matters, Strabo says, ‘the 
Athenians were always hospitable to foreign customs, so with 
the gods. They adopted many sacred customs from abroad and 
were ridiculed in comedies for doing so, and this especially as 
regards. Phrygian and Thracian rites. Plato mentions the 
Bendidean, and Demosthenes the Phrygian, rites in his accusation 
against Aeschines and his mother on the count that Aeschines 
joined his mother in her rites and went about in a thiasos and 
cried aloud Euoi Saboi and Hyes Attes, for these cries are of 
Sabazios and the Mother.’ 

It is then to comedy, to Aristophanes, that we owe most of our 
references to Sabazios, hints of his real character and his inner 
kinship with Dionysos. In an untranslateable pun in the Birds’ 
he tells us that Sabazios is a Phrygian, and from the Lysistrata* 
we learn that his worship was orgiastic and much affected by 
women. The ‘deputation man’ exclaims: 

‘Has the wantonness’ of women then blazed up, 


Their tabourings, Sabazios all about, 
Their clamour for Adonis on the roofs?’ 


But most instructive of all is the mention of Sabazios in the 


1 Diod. tv. 4. 2 Strab. x. 3 § 471. 
3 Ar. Av. 875 
kai dpvyiiw LaBagiw Kal crpovd@ weyady 
bentpi Seay Kai avOpaoTwr. 


4 Ar. Lys. 388. 


Lo 

~I 
| 

bho 


V 


420 Dionysos [ CH. 


opening of the Wasps’. The two slaves Sosias and Xanthias are 
watching over their master Bdelycleon. They know he is a 
dangerous monster and they ought to keep awake. 
‘Xan. I know, but I do want a little peace. 
Sos. Well, chance it then. Some sweet and drowsy thing 
Is falling drop by drop upon my eyes. 
Xan. What? Are you clean mad or a Korybant? 
Sos. No, a sleep holds me from Sabazios. 
Xan. And I too herd the same Sabazios. 
Just now a very Mede of a nodding sleep 
Came down and made an onset on my eyes.’ 

Sabazios is here clearly not so much the god of ecstasy and 
orgy as of compelling irresistible sleep. And why? A late 
historian gives the simple answer. 

Ammianus Marcellinus’ tells us that, when the Emperor Valens 
was besieging Chalcedon, the besieged by way of insult shouted to 
him ‘Sabaiarius. He adds in explanation ‘ sabaza is a drink of 
the poor in Illyria made of barley or corn turned into a liquor,’ 
‘Sabaiarius’ is then ‘Beer-man, beer-drinker or brewer. S. Jerome, 
himself a Dalmatian, says in his commentary on Isaiah*® that 
‘there is a sort of drink made from grain and water, and in 
the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia it is called, in the local 
barbarian speech, sabaiwm.’ To the wine-drinker the beer-drinker 
seemed a low fellow. Wine was in itself a rarer, finer beverage, 
probably at first more expensive. Even to-day in some parts of 
beer-drinking Germany to drink beer at the solemn midday dinner 
is almost a vulgarity. Sabazios, god of the cheap cereal drink, 
brings rather sleep than inspiration. 

The testimony of Sabazios is now added to that of Bromios 
and Braites. Separately the conjectured etymology of each epithet 
might fall far short of conviction, but the cumulative force of the 
three together offers evidence that seems conclusive. 


1 Are Vesp. 5—12. The word Bovxodeis (v. 6) points to the Bovxdd\o, priests or 
attendants of the bull-Dionysos. 

2 Ammian. Marcell, 26.8.2: est autem sabaia ex ordeo vel frumento in liquorem 
conyersis paupertinus in Illyrico potus. O. Schrader, Reallexikon p. 89, points out 
that the derivation of Sabazios from sabaia is possible, if the view of Kretschmer 
(Hinleitung p. 195) be accepted that Sabazios represents an earlier Savadios ; he 
compares the old Gallic divinity Braciaca ‘God of Malt.2. Mr A. B. Cook kindly 
drew my attention to the remark of De Vit in his edition of Forcellini’s Lewicon, 
s.vy. sabaia: ‘unde etiam zabaion vulgo apud nostrates ’ (Venetos ?). 

3 Hieron. Com. 7 in Is. cap. 19: quod genus est potionis ex frugibus aquaque 
confectum et vulgo in Dalmatiae Pannoniaeque provinciis gentili barbaroque sermone 
appellatur sabaiwm. 


te ete a ee ell 


vil | Tragedy the Spelt-song 421 


A fourth link in the chain still remains. The emperor Julian’s 
third pun tpayos, goat, and tpdyos, spelt, has yet to be con- 
sidered : . 


‘He smells of nectar like a god, you smack of goats and spelt.’ 


The word tpdyos is usually rendered ‘ goat,’ and the meaning 
‘spelt’ ignored. There is of course a reference to the time- 
honoured jest about the animal, but that the primary reference 
is to grain, not the goat, is clear from the words that immediately 
follow : 


‘For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt 
Made you,’ 

In translating I have therefore used both the meanings; the 
formal pun is untranslateable. 

It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain 
wild forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with 
the goat?, The reason is not clear, but the fact is well-established. 
The Latins called the wild fig caprificus ; Pausanias expressly tells 
us that the Messenians gave to the wild fig-tree the name tpayos, 
goat. Vines, when they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were 
said tpayav. 1 would conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt 
called tpdyos, goat, owes its name to this unexplained linguistic 
habit. It is even possible that the beard with which spelt is 
furnished may have helped out the confusion. Tragedy I believe 
to be not the ‘ goat-song,’ but the ‘ harvest-song’ of the cereal 
Tpayos, the form of spelt known as ‘the goat.’ When the god of 
the cereal, Bromios-Braites-Sabazios, became the god of the vine, 
the fusion and confusion of tpay@édia, the spelt-song, with tpuvye- 
dia, the song of the winelees?, was easy and indeed inevitable. 
The tpayédot, the ‘ beanfeast-singers, became tpuye@doé or ‘must- 
singers.’ 

The difficulties in the way of the canonical etymology of tragedy 
are acknowledged to be great*. In discussing the Satyrs it has 

1 This was first observed by Grimm (Geschichte d. d. Sprache p. 66), see Hehn, 
Kulturpflanzen, Tth edit. p. 550, but Hehn’s explanation of the custom does not 


seem satisfactory. Our custom of calling inferior varieties of plants by dog-names, 
e.g. Dog-Rose, Dog-Violet, seems analogous. 


2 For the group of words denoting ‘dregs’ e.g. O.P. dragios, with which 


Tpuywoia is connected, see Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities p. 322, and Hehn, 
Kulturpflanzen p. 159. 

3 For the literature of this protracted controversy see U. v. Wilamowitz, Eur. 
Her. 1. p. 32; A. Korte, Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1893, vit. p. 61: Loschke, A. Mitt. xy. 


< 


422 Dionysos . [ CH. 


already been shown that the primitive followers of Dionysos are 
mythologically conceived of not as goat-men, but as horse-men. 
The primitive ‘ goat-song;? we are asked to believe, was sung by 
a chorus of horse-men. The case in fact stands thus. We are 
confronted on the one hand by the undoubted fact that on 
countless vase-paintings of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the 
attendants of Dionysos are horse-men, while goat-men attend the 
Earth-goddess (p. 277); on the other hand we have the supposed 
fact that tragedy is the goat-song. But this supposed fact is 
merely an etymological assumption. If another etymology be 
found for tragedy, the whole discrepancy disappears. Such an 
etymology is, I think, offered by tpdayos ‘spelt, with the further 
advantage that it contains in itself a hint of how the goat mis- 
understanding arose. 


A fragment of Aeschylus cited, but I think erroneously, as 
evidence of a goat chorus remains to be examined. In a lost 
tragedy! a Satyr on the stage sees for the first time fire just given 
to mortals, and he runs to kiss her as though she were a beautiful 
maiden. Prometheus warns him: if you do this 


‘Youll be a goat mourning his beard.’ 


The passage is used as evidence for the goat form and dress of 
the Satyric chorus. Surely such an inference is needless; the 
point of the jest is the morals and manners of the Satyr. To 
reconstruct a goat-chorus out of a casual joke is labour in vain. 


We have then found four several titles, Bromios, Braites, 
Sabazios and tragedy, for which the supposition of a cereal drink 
affords a simple, satisfactory explanation. It remains to show that, 
though the words bromos, braiswm, sabaia and tragos have become 
to us dim and almost forgotten in the lapse of time, a cereal drink 
such as they imply was widely in use in ancient days, and that 
among Northern nations. 


The history of fermented drink in Europe seems to have been 


1894, p. 518; K. Wernicke, Hermes 1897, p. 290; Bethe, Proleg. p. 48. My own 
view was first suggested in the Classical Rev. July 1902, p. 331. 
1 Aesch. frg. 190 ap. Plut. Mor. p. 86 rod d€ carvpov 7d rip ws mpGrov wpbn 
Bovouévov pirjoat kal meprraBew 0 ILpounberis 
Tpayos yéverov apa mevOnoes ove. 


ViIr | Cereal Intoxicants 423 


briefly this. Never, so far back as we can look into mythology, was 
miserable man without some rudimentary means of intoxication. 
Before he had advanced to agriculture he had a drink made of 
naturally fermented honey, the drmk we now know as mead, 
which the Greeks called wé@u or wéOn. The epithet ‘sweet’ which 
they constantly apply to wine surprises us, but as a characteristic 
of ‘mead’ it is natural enough. This mead made of honey 
appears in ancient legends. When Zeus would intoxicate Kronos 
he gave him not wine, Porphyry* says, for wine was not, but a 
honey-drink to darken his senses. Night says to Zeus: 


‘When prostrate “neath the lofty oaks you see him 

Lie drunken with the work of murmuring bees, 

Then bind him,’ 
and again Plato” tells how when Poros falls asleep in the garden 
of Zeus he is drunk not with wine but with nectar, for wine was 
not yet. Nectar, the ancient drink of the gods, is mead made of 
honey; and men know this, for they offer to the primitive earth-god 
libations of honey (weAdo7rovda). The gods like their worshippers 
knew the joys of intoxication before the coming of the grape- 
Dionysos. Plutarch® says mead (wé@v) was used as a libation 
before the appearance of the vine, and ‘ even now those of the bar- 
barians who do not drink wine drink honey-drink’ (editevor). 
The nephalia are but intoxicants more primitive than wine. 

Next in order came the drinks made of cereals fermented, 
the various forms of beer and crude malt spirit. These gave to 
the Thracian Dionysos his names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, but 
they never seem to have found a real home in Greece. Mention 
of them occurs in classical writers, but they are always named as 
barbarian curiosities, as drinks in use in Thrace, Armenia, Egypt, 
but never like mead even in primitive times the national drink of 
Hellas. Isis in Egypt is addressed as not only Our Lady of Bread 
but also Our Lady of Beer‘, but Bromios when he comes to Greece 
forgets the oats from which he sprang. 

The first beer was probably a very rude product, like the drink 
mentioned by Xenophon’ as still in use among the Armenians of 
his day ; the grain was pounded and allowed to ferment with the 

1 Porph. de antr. nymph. 7. 2 Plat. Symp. § 203. 
3 Plut. Symp. rv. 6. 


4 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie d. alten Eqypter, p. 647. 
> Xen. Anab. iv. 5. 26 évjcay de kai atrai ai xpifai icoxerdets. 


424 Dionysos (cH. 


grains still floating about in the drinking-cups. The Lithuanians 
in the Middle Ages are said to have made their beer over-night 
and drunk it next morning’. Beer of this primitive kind was 
best sucked up through a pipe. Archilochus® alludes to the 
practice : 


‘As through a reed Phrygian and Thracian men 
Suck up their brew.’ 
The name given to the drink, Bpirov, means simply some- 
thing brewed or fermented. Aeschylus* in his Lykuwrgos makes 
some one, probably Lykurgos the Thracian, drink Bpdtov: 


‘Thereat he drank the bruton and waxed strong 
And boasted thus within the hero’s halls.’ 

Athenaeus, in the passage in which he quotes Archilochus, 
cites quite a number of authorities about the making of these 
rude cereal drinks. According to Hellanicus in his Origins, bruton 
could be made also of roots. ‘Some people,’ he says, ‘drink 
bruton made of roots as the Thracian drink is made of barley.’ 
Hecataeus in his Journey round Europe notes that the Paeonians 
drank bruton made from barley and an admixture of millet and 
endive. 

Another name for this drink made from grain was zythos. 
Diodorus‘ draws a lamentable picture of the straits to which the 
peoples of Gaul were put because ‘from the excessive cold and 
intemperate character of the climate, the land could not bring 
forth either wine or oil. Bereft of these products the Gauls make 
of barley the drink that is called zythos; they likewise wash out 
their honeycombs with water and use the rinsings. They had 
only imported wine, but to this they were excessively addicted 
(xatowvor), they drank it intemperately and either fell asleep dead 
drunk or became stark mad.’ Here we have the living historical 
prototype of the Centaurs, the uncivilized men who ‘cannot 
support the taste of wine, the lamentable story of imported in- 
toxicants told in all ages all the world over. 

The number of primitive beers—cervisia, korma, sabaia, zythos 

1 Lasicius, De Diis Sarmagitarum, p. 44. 

2 Archil. frg. ap. Athen. x. 67 § 447. Bergk 32 
worep map’ aid Bpirov 7 Opps auhp 
H Ppvé ESpvée. 


% Aesch, frg. 123 ap. Athen. loc. cit. 
4 Diod. v. 26. 





Vir | The Coming of the Vine 425 


—is countless and it would be unprofitable to discuss them in 
detail. All have this in common, and it is sufficient for our 
purpose, that they are spirituous drinks made of fermented grain, 
they appear with the introduction of agriculture, they tend to 
supersede mead, and are in turn superseded by wine. To put it 
mythologically the worship of Bromios, Braites and Sabazios pales 
before the Epiphany of Dionysos. Sabazios is almost wholly left 
behind, a foreigner never naturalized’, Bromios is transformed 
beyond recognition; to the old name is given a new meaning, a 
new etymology. 

It is important to note that had there been only Sabazios, had 
Bromios never emerged from himself, both would probably have 
remained in Thracian obscurity. The Thracians never conquered 
Greece; there was, therefore, no historical reason why their god 
should impose himself. His dominance is unquestionably due to 
the introduction and rapid spread of the vine. Popular tradition 
enshrined as it usually does a real truth—the characteristic gift 
(xa@pes) of Dionysos by which he won all hearts was wine, wine 
made not of barley but of the juice of the grape. A new, in- 
coming plant attaches itself to the local divinity, whoever and 
whatever he be. The olive attached itself to Athene who was 
there before its coming, and by the olive the prestige of Athene 
was sensibly increased; but the olive, great glory though it was 
and though a Sophocles sang its praises, had never the divine 
omnipotence of the vine. Olive oil over all the countries of 
Southern Europe supplanted the other primitive grease, butter’, 
Butter is hard to keep fresh in hot countries, as every traveller 
finds to his cost in Italy and Greece to-day. But the supersession 
of butter by oil was a quiet, unnoticed advance, not a triumphant 
progress like the Coming of the Vine. 


We are now at last in a position to say what was the characteristic 
essence of the worship of Dionysos. The fact however repugnant 


1 Tn the north as to-day the Beer-god retained his supremacy. It is interesting 
to note that the British saint, St Brigida, re-performed the miracle of Cana with 
the characteristically northern modification that she turned the water into excellent 
beer: Christi autem ancilla videns quia tune illico non poterat invenire cerevisiam, 
aquam ad balneum portatam benedixerit et in optimam cerevisiam conversa est a 
Deo et abundanter sitientibus propinata est. Acta SS. Febr. 1. Vita tv. 8, Brigidae 
cap. Iv. quoted by Hehn, op. cit. p. 149. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead 
(Chap. cx.) the desire of the soul is for cakes and ale, 

2 Hehn, Kulturpflanzen, 7th edit. p. 154. 


426 Dionysos [CH. 


must be fairly faced. This essence was intoxication. But by the 
very nature of primitive thought this essence was almost instantly 
transformed into something more, something deeper and higher 
than mere physical intoxication. It was intoxication thought of 
as possession. The savage tastes of some intoxicant for the first 
time, a great delight takes him, he feels literally a new strange 
life within him. How has it come about? The answer to him is 
simple. He is possessed by a god (év@eos), not figuratively but 
literally and actually; there is a divine thing within him that is ~ 
more than himself, he is mad, but with a divine madness. All 
intense sorrow or joy is to him obsession, possession. When in the 
Hippolytus* the chorus see Phaedra distraught with passion, in- 
stinctively they ask: 

‘Ts this some spirit, O child of man, 

Doth Hecate hold thee perchance or Pan, 

Doth She of the Mountains work her ban 

Or the dread Corybantes bind thee ?’ 
They utter not poetical imagery but a real belief. 

To what beautiful imaginations, to what high spiritual vision 
this Bacchic cult of intoxication led will best be considered when 
we come to speak of Orpheus. For the present some other 
primitive elements in Dionysiac worship remain to be considered, 
elements essential to the understanding of his cult. 


- DIoNysOS THE TREE-GOD (DENDRITES). 


Intoxication is of the essence of the god Dionysos, it is the 
element that marks him out from other gods, it is the secret of 
his missionary impulse ; but to suppose that it exhausts his content 
would be a grave misunderstanding. There go to his making not 
only this distinctive element of intoxication but certain other 
primitive factors common to the gods of other peoples. 

Thinking people even in antiquity, when the study of com- 
parative mythology scarcely existed, were struck by analogies 
between Dionysos and other divinities. Plutarch, who thought 
much, if somewhat vaguely, on religious matters, was very sensible 
of this. In the enlightened and instructive parallel that he 


1 Kur. Hipp. 141. 





VIII | Dionysos as Dendrites 427 


draws' between Osiris and Dionysos, he sees that Dionysos like 
the gods of many other peoples is a god who in some sense 
embodies the life of nature that comes and goes with the seasons, 
dies and rises again with the fruits of the earth. In a passage 
full of insight he draws attention to the analogies of the diverse 
cults he had observed. ‘The Phrygians think that the god is 
asleep in the winter, and is awake in summer, and at the one 
season they celebrate with Bacchic rites his goings to bed and at 
the other his risings up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in 
the winter he is bound down and imprisoned and in the spring he 
is stirred up and let loose. The passage and others that will 
later be quoted are as it were a forecast of the whole compara- 
tive method. 

The truth that Dionysos, like many another god, was a god of 
the impulse of life in nature was not only apprehended by the 
philosopher, it was also evidenced in cultus. This is seen very 
clearly in two popular phases of the worship of Dionysos, his 
worship as a tree-god and his worship as a bull. 

The vine is a tree; but Dionysos is Dendrites, Tree-god, and 
a plant-god in a far wider sense. He is god of the fig-tree, 
Sykites; he is Kissos, god of the ivy; he is Anthios, god of 
all blossoming things; he is Phytalmios, god of growth. In this 
respect he differs scarcely at all from certain aspects of Poseidon, 
or from the young male god of Attica and the Peloponnese, 
Hermes. Probably this aspect of the god, at once milder and 
wider, was always acceptable in Southern Greece and made his 
affiliation with the indigenous Hermes an easy matter. This 
affiliation is clearly shown by the fact that in art Hermes and 
Dionysos appear, as they were worshipped in cultus, as herms; the 
symbol of both as gods of fertility is naturally the phallos. The 
young Dionysos, a maturer Liknites, is not distinguishable from 
Hermes. 

On the beautiful cylix by Hieron? reproduced in fig. 132, 
perhaps the most exquisite thing that ancient ceramography has 


1 Plut. de Is. et Osir. ux1x. Ppiryes dé Tov Bedv oldpevor Xetmwvos Kabevdew, O€pous 5” 
eypnyopévar, Tore ev KaTevvacmols, Tore 5 dveyéptes Baxxevovres atT@ Tedodct, 
TlapAayéves 6€ karadeicbar Kal Kabelpyrvucbar xeuwvos, jpos dé KwetoOa kai avahverOar 
gdckovot. The earlier portion of this passage deals with the analogous cult of 
Demeter (p. 128) already discussed. 

2 Berlin, Cat. 2290. Wiener Vorlegebliitter, Serie A, Taf. vr. 


428 Dionysos [CH. 


left us, this affiliation is clearly shown. In the centre design 
Dionysos is all vine-god. He holds a great vine-branch in his left 
hand, in his right his own sceptre the thyrsos ; his worshipper is — 
a horse-Satyr piping on the double flutes. But on the exterior of 


SEAS 


RN \\ 





Fre. 132. 


the cup, a scene of cultus rather than mythology, he is of wider 
import, he is Dendrites. The god round whom the lovely Maenads 
dance in circle is a rude pillar or plank draped with a splendid 
ritual garment. It is a primitive herm decorated with great 


\ 


vim | Dionysos as Dendrites 429 


bunches of grapes, but also with ivy sprigs and honeycombs and 
a necklace of dried figs, such as the Greek peasant now-a-days 
takes with him for food on a journey. He is god of all grow- 
ing things, of every tree and plant and natural product, and only 
later exclusively of the vine. He takes to himself ivy and pine 
and honeycomb. The honey-drink he supersedes, yet honey is 
sacred to him. Only the olive he never takes, for Athene had it 
already. Ivy especially was sacred to him; his Maenads chewed 
ivy leaves! for inspiration, as the Delphic prophetess chewed the 
bay. Pliny’ says: ‘Even to this day ivy is used to decorate the 
thyrsos of the god and the helmets and shields used by the peoples 
of Thrace in their rites, and this ritual ivy is remembered by 
Dionysos when he comes to Thebes*: 
‘IT cry to Thebes to waken, set her hands 


To clasp my wand, mine ivied javelin, 
And round her shoulders hang my wild fawn-skin.’ 


Very primitive in form but wholly of the vine-god is the 
xoanon on a krater in the Campana collection of the Louvre* 





Higuelos. 


1 Plut. Quaest. R. cxt. 2 Pliny N.H. XVI. 62. 
3 Eur. Bacch. 55. 4 Annali d. Inst. 1862, Tav. d’ agg. C. 


430 Dionysos [ CH. 


(fig. 133). The image of the god is a column treated as a 
herm, and reminds us that Dionysos was called by the name 
Perikonios, He-about-the-pillar. The two representations in 
figs. 133 and 132 are characteristically different. The rude Satyrs 
have but one way of worshipping their god, they fall upon the 
wine-cup; the Maenads, worshipping the god of life, bend in 
ritual ecstasy to touch the earth, mother of life; the wine-jar in 
Hieron’s vase is present as a symbol, but the Maenads revel 
aloof. 

The worship of the tree-god was probably indigenous in Thrace 
long before the coming of the vine. We have evidence that it 
lingered on there down to Roman times. An inscription on 
a cippus recently discovered in a mosque at Eski Djoumi’ and now 
in the museum at Saloniki affords curious evidence. The cippus 
marked the grave of a priestess of Dionysos. Her name is lost, but 
the word priestess (epeia) is followed by two characteristically 
Bacchic epithets, @PJca and eveia. She is priestess of the thiasos 
of the ‘Carriers of the Evergreen Oak’ (arpevodopor), and she leaves 
to her guild certain property in vineyards. If they do not fulfil the 
conditions of the bequest, including the offering of a wreath of roses, 
the property is to go to another thiasos, that of the ‘Carriers of the 
Oak’ (Apotogpopor), and on the same conditions. 


The tree-god was too simple for the philosopher. He wanted 
to abstract Dionysos, rid him of not only his anthropomorphic 
but his zoomorphic and phytomorphic shapes. Still he used the 


tree-god as a stepping-stone to his ‘principle of moisture.’ 
Plutarch? says the Greeks regard Dionysos as not merely lord 


and originator of wine, b le principle of moisture, — 


Of this, he adds, Pindar is in hence sufficient witness when he 
Says : 
‘Of all the trees that are 

He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root, 


The Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star 
That shines amid the gathering of the fruit.’ 


Plutarch is fond of this beautiful little bit of Pindar. He 


1 Perdrizet, Bull. de Corr. Hell. 1900, p. 322 
2 Plut. de Is, et Os. xxxv. 87 & ob pbvov rod olvov Arcévucoy adda Kal maons vypas 
picews"EAnves iyyotvrae Kiprov Kal apxnyov apKet Ilivdapos wdprus eivac Néywv  —. 
Aevipéwy 5é véuov Atévucos ro\vyHOns avéavor 
ayvov péyyos orwpas. 


a 


~ 


vur| The ‘ Principle of Moisture’ 431 


quotes it again in his Symposiacs’. A friend who is a farmer 
objects that Plutarch has shut out his calling from the worship 
of the Muses, whereas he had hoped that at least Thalia, goddess 
of increase, might be his to worship. Plutarch says the charge is 
not a just one, for farmers have Dendrites, He-of-the-Trees, and 
Anesidora, She-who-sends-up-gifts ; and then he quotes his 
favourite passage. Pindar is of course no evidence for a Prin- 
ciple of Moisture. Neither poets nor primitive people use any 
such philosophical jargon ; but all the world over primitive man 
did and still does welcome the coming and lament the going of the 
something or someone who makes the trees and plants to grow 
and beasts and man to bring forth. Later, though they are little 
the wiser as to what that something is, they will call it the 
‘Principle of Moisture, or if they are poets Love or Life. 

The ‘ Principle of Moisture’ was in fashion among theologists 
long before Plutarch. In the Bacchae of Euripides the new wine 
of the religion of Dionysos has to be poured into some very old 
bottles. Teiresias in a typically orthodox fashion, characteristic of 
the timid and kindly priest all the world over, tries to water it 
down with weak rationalism. Dionysos, he urges, is not new at 
all, he is very old, as old and respectable as Demeter herself; she 
is the Principle of Dryness, he of Moisture, nothing could be more 
safe and satisfactory. He thus instructs honest Pentheus?: 

‘Two spirits there be, 
Young prince, that in man’s world are first of worth. 
Demeter one is named. She is the Earth— 
Call her what name thou wilt !—who feeds man’s frame 
With sustenance of things dry. And that which came 
Her work to perfect, second, is the Power 
From Semele born. He found the liquid shower 
Hid in the grape®.’ 

This is the rationalism not of the poet Euripides, but of 
the priest Teiresias. This is clear, for the poet in the next line 
breaks clean away from the tiresome Dryness and Moisture and 
is gone to the magic of sleep and the blood of the God out- 


poured. , 


1 Plut. Symp. rx. 14. 4. 2 Hur. Bacch. 274. 

3 The doctrine of Teiresias was wide-spread in Greece by the time of Diodorus. 
He says (Iv. 3): KadXov dé pvOodoyoicr Tov Deady peylaTns amodoxAs TUyXavEW Tap’ 
avOpwrots Tovs Tals evepyecias UrepBadouevous Kara Ti eUper TOV ayabGy Acévucdy TE 
kal Anunrpa, Tov méev TOD mpoonvecTdrou Torov yevomevoy evpéTny, THY OE THS Enpas 
Tpopis Thy KpatioTny Tapadovoay TH yéve THY avOpwrwr. 


432 Dionysos [CH. . 


Plutarch quotes Pindar as authority for the Principle of 
Moisture, and undoubtedly the sap of trees and plants sacred to 
Dionysos may have helped out the abstraction. But, had Plutarch 
known it, the notion is associated not so much with Dendrites, the 
Tree-God, as with a figure perhaps still more primitive, Dionysos 
the Bull. 


DIoNYsoSs THE BULL-GoD. 


Dionysos Dendrites is easy to realize; he is but a step back 
from the familiar, canonical Vine-god. The Bull-god Dionysos 
is harder to accept because we have lost the primitive habit of 
thinking from which he sprang. The Greeks themselves suffered 
the like inconvenience. They rapidly advanced to so complete 
an anthropomorphism that in Periclean Athens the dogma of the 
Bull-incarnation was, we cannot doubt, a stumbling-block, a faith 
as far as possible put out of sight. 

The particular animal in which a god is incarnate depends of 
course on the circumstances of the worshippers. If he is in a 
land lion-haunted his god will be apt to take shape as a lion; 
later the lion will be his attendant, his servitor. Lions attend 
the Mountain-Mother of Asia Minor, guard her as has been seen 
(p. 265) in heraldic fashion, draw her chariot, watch her throne’. 
In like manner Dionysos, son of Semele, who is but one form of 
the same Earth-Mother, has a chariot drawn by lions (fig. 125), 
and sometimes, though not so frequently as his Mother, an 
attendant lion. 

In the vase-painting in fig. 134 from an amphora in the British 
Museum’ Dionysos, with kantharos and great spreading vine, 
stands between two great prophylactic eyes. A little lion looks 
up at him, dog-hke, adorimg his master. On the reverse 
Hephaistos with his mallet carries the vine in token of the 
power of the god. The lion in this picture is losing his reality, 
because the lion has ceased to be a dominant terror in Greece. 
The god of a civilized, agricultural people must reincarnate him- 
self in other animal shapes, in the Snake, in the Kid, most of all 
in the Bull. The Bull-god may have been too savage for Periclean 


1 Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, pp. 44—50. 
2 B.M. Cat. w 264,. Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder, Taf. 38. 


VIII | Dionysos as Bull-god 433 


Athens, but Euripides must have found him in full force in 
Macedonia. To a people of goat-herds like the Arcadians the 
goat is the impersonation of life and generation; to a people of 

















Fie. 134. 


cow-herds the bull is the more potent and splendid vehicle. In 
the Bacchae there are Snake-Epiphanies, Lion-Epiphanies, but 
first and foremost Bull-Epiphanies. At the mystery of the Birth’ 
‘A Horned God was found 
And a God with serpents crowned.’ 

In the supreme Orphic mystery, to be discussed later (p. 483), 
the worshipper before he became ‘ Bacchos’ ate the raw flesh of a 
bull, and, probably in connection with this sacrament, the Bull form 
of the god crystallized into a mystery dogma. When Pentheus has 
imprisoned the ‘Bacchos’ he finds in the manger not the beautiful 
stranger but a raging bull; the hallucination was doubtless bred of 
ancient faith and ritual. Again when in the Bacchae* Dionysos 


1 Eur. Bacch. 99. 2 Kur. Bacch. 918. 


Hy 
bo 
oa) 


434 Dionysos [ CH. 


leads him forth enchanted to his doom on Cithaeron, Pentheus in 
his madness sees before him strange sights: 


‘Yea and mine eye 

Is bright! Yon sun shines twofold in the sky, 

Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates, 

And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits 

Before me? There are horns upon thy brow! 

What art thou, man or beast? For surely now 

The Bull is on thee !’ 
and last when at the moment of their uttermost peril the Bacchants 
invoke their Lord to vengeance, the ancient incarnations loom in 
upon their maddened minds? : 

‘Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name, 

O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, 

Lion of the Burning Flame! 

O God, Beast, Mystery, come !’ 

All this madness is based not only on a definite faith, but that 
faith is the utterance of a definite ritual. In discussing the name 
Bromios we have seen (p. 415) that in the ritual of Dionysos 
in Thrace there were ‘bull-voiced mimes’ who bellowed to the 
god. \\The scholiast? on Lycophron’s Alexandra says that the 
‘women who worshipped Dionysos Laphystios wore horns them- 
selves, in imitation of the god, for he is imagined to be bull-headed 
and is so represented in art.’ Plutarch® gives more particulars. 
‘Many of the Greeks represent Dionysos in their images in the 
form of a bull, and the women of Elis in their prayers invoke the 
god to come to them with his bull-foot, and among the Argives 
there is a Dionysos with the title Bull-born. And they summon 
him by their trumpets out of the water, casting into the depths 
lambs to the Door-keeper; they hide their trumpets in their 
thyrsoi, as Socrates has told in his treatise on the Hosioi’ A 
bull-god is summoned and he emerges from water. 

It will later (p. 496) be seen to what strange theological uses 
the Orphics put their bull and lion and snake-shaped Epiphanies ; 
for the present it must be noted how near akin these were to the 
shapes that the Southern Greeks gave to their own indigenous 


1 Bur. Bacch. 1017 
gpavjOe tadpos 7 modvKpavos ide 
Spdxwv 7) mupipréywv opadcba éwv. 
2 Schol. ad Lyc. Al. 1237 keparogopodor yap kal abrac kata plunow Acovicor, 
TavpoKpavos yap pavrdferar Kal (wypaetrar 
3 Plut. de Is. et Os. xxxv. 


ViIr | Dionysos as Bull-god 435 


gods. Zeus and Athene and even Poseidon had, by the fifth 
century B.C., become pure human shapes, but the ministrants of 
Poseidon at Cyzicus were down to the time of Athenaeus known as 
Bulls’, and lower divinities like rivers still kept their bull shape, 
witness the pathetic story of Deianeira and Acheloiis? : 


‘A river was my lover, him I mean 

Great Acheloiis, and in threefold form 

Wooed me, and wooed again; a visible bull 
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled gleaming snake, 
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape 
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard 
Fountains of clear spring water glistening flowed.’ 


In those old divine days a wooer might woo in a hundred 
shapes, and a maiden in like fashion might fly his wooing. It is 
again Sophocles’ who tells us of the marriage of Pentheus : 


‘The wedlock of his wedding was untold, 
His wrestling with the maiden manifold.’ 


The red-figured vase-painting in fig. 135 looks almost like an 
illustration of the Trachiniae+. Here is the monster; but he is 





man-fronted, his body that of a bull, and from his mouth flows 
the water of his own stream Acheloiis. Herakles is about to break 
off his mighty horn, the seat of his strength; Deianeira stands by 
unmoved. With odd insistence on his meaning the vase-painter 
1 Athen. § 425. 2 Soph. Trach. 9. 3 Soph. frg. 548. 
4 Archdologische Zeitung xvi. (1883), Taf. 11, This vase is now in the Louvre. 
28—2 


436 Dionysos [ CH. 


draws in a horn parallel with the stream to show that, the 
stream is itself a cornucopia of growth and riches. The vase- 
painting is many years earlier than the play of Sophocles. 

I know of no instance where an actual bull-Dionysos is repre- 
sented on a vase-painting, but in the design in fig. 136 from an 





Era: 136; 


amphora’ in the Wiirzburg Museum his close connection is indicated 
by the fact that he rides on a bull. From the kantharos in his 
hand he pours his gift of wine. This representation is of special 
interest because on the reverse of the same vase Poseidon holding 
his trident is represented riding on a white bull. This looks as 
though the vase-painter had in his mind some analogy between 
the two divinities of moisture and growth. 

With the bull-Poseidon and the bull river-god at hand, the 
assimilation of the bull-shaped Dionysos would be an easy task, 
the more as he was god of sap and generation and life, as well as 
of wine. Water and wine were blended in theology as in daily 
life, and the Greeks of the South lent the element of water. 


1 Gerhard, Auserlesene Vasenbilder, Taf. 47. 


vii | Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb 437 


Dionysos then by his tree-shape and his bull-shape is clearly 
shown to be not merely a spirit of intoxication, but rather a 
primitive nature god laid hold of, informed by a spirit of intoxi- ; 
cation. Demeter and Kore are nature-goddesses, they have their 
uprisings and down-goings, but to the end they remain sedate 
and orderly. Dionysos is as it were the male correlative of Kore, 
but informed, transfigured by this new element of intoxication 
and orgy. 

This double nature of the god finds expression in one of his 
titles, the cultus epithet of Dithyrambos, and it is only by keeping 
his double aspect clearly in mind that this difficult epithet can at 
all be understood. 


DITHYRAMBOS AND THE DITHYRAMB. 


The title Dithyrambos given to Dionysos and the Dithyramb, 
the song sung in his honour, must be considered together, in fact 
this title like ‘Iacchos’ seems to have arisen out of the song. 

The epithet Dithyrambos was always regarded by the Greeks 
themselves as indicating and describing the manner of the birth 
of the god. Disregarding the quantity of the vowel 7 in Di they 
believed it to be derived from Az and @vpa, double door, and took | 
it to mean ‘he who entered life by a double door, the womb of his 
mother and the thigh of his father. This was to them the cardinal 
‘mystery’ of the birth. So much is clear from the birth-song of 
the chorus in the Bacchae': 

‘ Acheloiis’ roaming daughter, 
Holy Dirce, virgin water, 
Bathed he not of old in thee 
The Babe of God, the Mystery ? 
When from out the fire immortal 
To himself his God did take him, 
To his own flesh, and bespake him: 
‘Enter now life’s second portal, 
Motherless mystery; lo I break 
Mine own body for thy sake, 
Thou of the Two-fold Door, and seal thee 


Mine, O Bromios”—thus he spake— 
“And to this thy land reveal thee.”’ 


Dithyrambos was ‘he of the miraculous birth, Liknites con- 


1 Eur. Bacch, 519. 


438 Dionysos [ CH. 


ceived mystically. The mistaken etymology need not make us 
distrust the substantial truth of the tradition. 

As Dithyrambos is the Babe mystically born, so the Dithyramb 
was uniformly regarded as the Song of the Birth./ /Plato states 
this, though somewhat tentatively, in the Zaws'. When discuss- 
ing various kinds of music he says: ‘Another form of song, the 
Birth of Dionysos called, I think, the dithyramb.’ / 

It has already been seen that Dionysos as the principle of life 
and generation was figured as a bull, it is therefore no surprise 
to learn from Pindar? that the Dithyramb ‘drives’ the bull: 

‘Whence did appear the Charites who sing 
To Dionyse their king 
The dithyramb, the chant of Bull-driving ?’ 

The Charites here halt half-way between ritual and poetry. 
They are half abstract rhythmical graces, half the Charites of an 
actual cult. The song of invocation to the Bull sung by the 
women of Elis has been already noted. It is the earliest Dithy- 
ramb preserved, and happily in his Greek Questions Plutarch’ has 
left us a somewhat detailed account. He asks, ‘Why do the 
women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present 
with them with his bull-foot?’ He goes on to give the exact 
words of the little ritual hymn: 

Hero, Dionysos, come 

To thy temple-home 

Here at Elis, worshipful 

We implore thee 

With thy Charites adore Thee, 
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come ! 
Noble Bull, noble Bull.’ 

The fact that ‘Hero’ precedes ‘Dionysos’ in the invocation 
makes it tempting to conjecture that we have here a superposition 
of cults, that the women of Elis long before the coming of 
Dionysos worshipped a local hero in the form of a bull and that 


* Plato Legg. 111. 700 B ddXo eldos dis Acovicou yévects, oluat, 5OKpauBos Neyouevos. 
2 Pind. Ol. x11. 18 
tal Awwvicov mbdev é&épavev 
atv Bonddra xaperes StOupd : 
Peni, ()5 (Chm Feo Opie i ca ares 
"ENGet jpw Arévuce 
"Arelwy és vadr, 
ayvov ovv xaplrecow 
és vaov Tw Boéw modi Oiwv. 
"Ake radpe, d&ie rape. 


vit | Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb 439 


Dionysos affiliated his cult; but another possibility is perhaps 
more probable, that Hero is in the hymn purely adjectival. It 
has already been shown that the word meant to begin with only 
‘strong’ and then ‘strong one.’ 

The mention of the Charites is important. They are the givers 
of increase (p. 298), who naturally attend the coming of the life- 
god; they seem here analogous to the nurses of Dionysos, the 
sober form of his Maenads. They attend alike his coming and his 
birth. 

In the Delphic Paean (p. 417), where the birth of Dionysos in 
the spring is celebrated, the title Dithyrambos! is first and fore- 
“most, before Bacchos, Euios, Braites and Bromios: 


‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come, 

Euios, Thrysos-Lord, Braites, come, 
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring 
Holy hours of thine own holy spring. 

Evoe, Bacchos, hail, Paean, hail, 

Whom in sacred Thebes the mother fair, 

She, Thyone, once to Zeus did bear. 

All the stars danced for joy. Mirth 

Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth.’ 


The new-born god is Dithyrambos, and he is born at the resur- 
rection of earth in the spring-time. 

The epithet Paean, belonging to Apollo, is here given to 
Dionysos. At the great festival of the finishing of the temple all 
is to be harmony and peace; theology attempts an edifying but 
impossible syncretism. Nothing in mythology is more certain 
than that the Paean and the Dithyramb were to begin with poles 
asunder, and it is by the contrast between them that we best 
understand not only the gist of the Dithyramb itself but the 
significance of the whole religion of Dionysos. 


The contrast between Apollo and Dionysos, Paean and Dithy- 
ramb, has been sharply and instructively drawn by Plutarch, 


1 [Acip’ dva A]:OvpauBe, Bary’, 
e[tve Oupo7j)pes, Bpai- 
Ta, Bpout(e), npwalts ixov 
Taicd(e)] iepats év wpars. 
Huot @ io [Baxx’ & ié Maa]y 
[6]v O7Bats mor’ ev eviars 
Znfvi yetvaro] kadNimas Ovawva. 
mavtes 5 [darépes ayx |opev- 
oav, mavres dé Bporol x[apn- 
oav oats], Baxxve, yévvass. 


I have followed throughout Dr H. Weil’s version. 


440 Dionysos [ CH. 


himself a priest at Delphi. The comparison instituted by Plutarch 
between the rites of Osiris and those of Dionysos has been already 
noted (p. 402). In the discourse about Isis and Osiris}, it will be 
remembered, Plutarch says ‘the affair about the Titans and the 
Night of Accomplishment accords with what are called in the 
rites of Osiris “'Tearings to pieces,’ Resurrections, Regenerations. 
The same,’ he adds, ‘is true about rites of burying. The Egyptians 
show in many places burial chests of Osiris, and the Delphians 
also hold that the remains of Dionysos are deposited with them 
near to the place of the oracle, and the Consecrated Ones (écvor) 
perform a secret sacrifice in the sanctuary of Apollo what time 
the Thyiades awaken Liknites.’ In a word, at Delphi there were 
rites closely analogous to those of Osiris and concerned with the 
tearing to pieces, the death and burial of the god Dionysos, and 
his resurrectiov and re-birth as a child. 

In another discourse (On the Ei at Delphi) Plutarch® tells us 
that these ceremonials were concerned with the god as Dithy- 
rambos, that the characteristic of the Dithyramb was that it sang 
of these mutations, these re-births, and that it was thereby marked 
off sharply from the Paean of Apollo. The passage is so in- 
structive both as to the real nature of Dionysos and as reflecting 
the attitude of an educated Greek towards his religion that it 
must be quoted in full. Plutarch has been discussing and con- 
trasting Dionysos and Apollo apropos of the worship of Dionysos 
at Delphi, a worship every detail of which he must certainly have 
known. Dionysos, he says, has just as much to do with Delphi as 
Apollo himself, a statement rather startling to modern ears. Then 
he begins to work out the contrast between the two gods after the 
philosophic fashion of his day. Apollo is the principle of simplicity, 
unity and purity, Dionysos of manifold change and metamorphosis. 
This is the esoteric doctrine known to experts, cloaked from the 
vulgar. Among these experts (cod@Tepor) were probably, as will 
be seen later (p. 463), Orphic theologians. He goes on to tell 
how these esoteric doctrines were expressed in popular ritual. 
He of course inverts the natural order of development. He 
believes that the doctrine known only to the few gave rise to 
a ritual intended to express it in popular terms for the vulgar ; 


1 Plut. de Is. et Os. xxxv. 
2 Plut. de Ei ap. Delph. rx. 


VIII | Dithyrambos and the Dithyramb 441 


whereas of course in reality the ritual existed first and was then 
by the experts made to bear a mystical meaning. Bearing this 
proviso in mind Plutarch’s account is full of interest. ‘These 
manifold changes that Dionysos suffers into winds and water and 
earth and stars and the births of plants and animals they enigma- 
tically term “rending asunder” and “ tearing limb from limb” ; 
and they call the god Dionysos and Zagreus and Nyktelios and 
Isodaites, and tell of certain Destructions and Disappearances 
and Resurrections and New-Births which are fables and riddles, 
appertaining to the aforesaid metamorphoses. And to him (Le. 
Dionysos) they sing dithyrambic measures full of sufferings and 
metamorphosis, which metamorphosis has in it an element of 
wandering and distraction. For “it is fitting,” as Aeschylus says, 
that “the dithyramb of diverse utterance should accompany 
Dionysos as his counterpart, but the ordered Paean and the 


sober Muse should attend Apollo.” And artists in sculpture , 


represent Apollo as ever young and ageless, but Dionysos they 
represent as having many forms and shapes. In a word;/hey 
attribute to the one uniformity and order and an earnest simplicity, 
but to the other a certain incongruousness owing to a blend made 
up of sportiveness and excess and earnestness and madness. They 
invoke him thus: 


“Kuios, thou Dionysos, who by the flame of thy rite 
Dost women to madness incite.”’ 


Plutarch goes on to tell of the division of the ritual year 
at Delphi between Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo as imcoming 
conqueror has taken the larger and the fairer portion. 

‘And since the time of the revolutions in these changes is 
not equal, but the one which they call Satiety is longer, and the 
other which they call Craving is shorter, they observe in this 
matter a due proportion. For the remainder of the year they use 
the Paean in their sacrificial ceremonies, but at the approach of 
winter they wake up the Dithyramb and make the Paean cease. 
For three months they invoke the one god (Dionysos) in place 
of the other (Apollo), as they hold that in respect to its duration 
the setting in order of the world is to its conflagration as three to 
one.’ 

Plutarch’s use of technical terms, e.g. conflagration (é«7rv- 
pwovs), betrays that he is importing into his religious discussion 


- ti 3 | 
442 Dionysos [ CH. 


philosophic speculations, and especially those of Heraclitus. Into 
these it is unnecessary to follow him; the important points that 
emerge for the present argument are that the Dithyramb was 


a ritual song sung in the winter season, probably at_festivals 


connected with the winter solstice, of an orgiastic character and 


dealing with the god as an impersonation of natural forces, dealing _ 
with his sufferings, his death and resurrection, and as such con- 
and with it the title Dithyrambos, resume the two factors that 
we have detected in the religion of Dionysos, the old spirit of 
life and generation, and the new spirit of intoxication. 


It remains to enquire if any light can be thrown on the difficult 
etymology! of the word. 


The popular etymology, that saw in Dithyrambos the god-of- 
the-double-door, is of course impossible. Dithyrambos, all philo- 
logists agree, cannot etymologically be separated from its cognate 
thriambos, which gave to the Latins their word triwmphus. The 
word thriambos looks as if it were formed on the analogy of zambos. 
It may be that Suidas* among his many confused conjectures as 
to the meaning of the word throws out accidentally the right clue. 
He says ‘they call the madness of poets thriasis. May not 
thriambos mean the mad inspired orgiastic measure? ‘The first 
syllable with its long 7 may possibly be referred to the root Ac 
already discussed under Diasia (p. 23). At a time when in 
etymology the length of syllables was wholly disregarded the Av 
in Avos might help out the confusion, and last some brilliant 
theologian intent on edification thought of the double doors. 
Mythology has left us dim hints as to the functions of certain 
ancient maiden prophetesses at Delphi called Thriae. May 
they not have been the Mad Maidens who sang the mad song, 
the thriambos ? 

Of the Thriae we are told by Philochoros*® that they were 


1 The suggestion that follows as to the connection of the word Dithyramb with 
Thriae is only given tentatively. It is also possible that the word Dithyramb may 
be of foreign origin. Epiphanius (Adv. Haeres. vol. 1. bk iii. p. 1093 p) tells of 
a goddess in Egypt, worshipped with orgiastic rites under the name Ti@paufos. 
She was akin to Hecate (dX 5€ rp TOpauSw ‘Exarny épunvevouérnr). Ti@pauBos 
may have come with other orgiastic elements from Crete to Thrace (see p. 460). 

* Suidas s.v. Aéyouor yap Opiacw thy Trav romrey paviav. 

% Philoch. frg. 125 ap. Zenob. prov. cent. v. 75 Pitdxopbs Pnow Sri vipa Karetxyov 


vu] The Thriae 443 


nymphs of Parnassos, nurses of Apollo. Save for this mention we 
never hear that Apollo had any nurses, he was wholly the son 
of his father. Is it not more probable that they were nurses of 
Dionysos ? 

The account of these mysterious Thriae given in the Homeric 
Hymn! to Hermes is strange and suggestive. Hermes is made to 
tell how his first gift of prophecy came not from Zeus, but from 
three maiden prophetesses : 


‘For there are sisters born, called Thriae, maiden things, 

Three are they and they joy them in glory of swift wings. 

Upon their heads is sprinkled fine flour of barley white, 

They dwell aloof in dwellings beneath Parnassos’ height. 

They taught me love of soothsaying, while I my herds did feed, 

Being yet a boy. Of me and mine my father took no heed. 

And thence they flitted, now this way, now that, upon the wing, 

And of all things that were to be they uttered soothsaying. 

What time they fed on honey fresh, food of the gods divine, 

Then holy madness made their hearts to speak the truth incline, 

But if from food of honeycomb they needs must keep aloof 

Confused they buzz among themselves and speak no word of sooth.’ 

The Thriae are nurses like the Maenads, they rave in holy 
madness (@viovarv) like the Thyiades, but their inspiration is not 
from Bacchos, the wine-god, not even from Bromios or Sabazios or 
Braites, the beer-gods; it is from a source, from an intoxicant yet 
more primitive, from honey. They are in a word ‘ Melissae,’ 
honey-priestesses, inspired by a honey intoxicant; they are bees, 
their heads white with pollen; they hum and buzz, swarming 
confusedly. The honey service of ancient ritual has already been 
noted (p. 91), and the fact that not only the priestesses of 
Artemis at Ephesus were ‘ Bees, but also those of Demeter, and, 
still more significant, the Delphic priestess herself was a Bee. 
The oracle of the Bessi (p. 370) was delivered by a priestess, and 
the analogy with Delphi is noted by Herodotus; may not the 
priestess of the Bessi have also been a Bee? The Delphic 
priestess in historical times chewed a laurel leaf, but when she 
was a Bee surely she must have sought her inspiration in the 


honeycomb. 


With all these divine associations about the bee, a creature 


tov Iapvaccév tpodot ’Amé\\wvos Tpeis Kadovpevar Opiat, ad’ wv ai wavtixal Php 
Opiat KadovvTat. 

1 Hom. Hymn. ad Merc. 551—563. I accept Hermann’s reading Opiai for 
Motpa, cf. Gemoll ad loc. 


444 Dionysos [ CH. 


wondrous enough in nature, it is not surprising that she was 
figured by art as a goddess and half human. In fig. 137 we have 
such a representation!, a woman with high 
curled wings and a bee body from the waist 
downwards. The design is from a gold 
embossed plaque found at Camiros. 
When Euripides would tell of the dread 
power of Aphrodite haunting with her 
doom all living things, Aphrodite who 
was heir to all the sacred traditions of the 
Earth-Mother, the image of the holy bee Fic. 137. 
comes to his mind charged with mysterious 
associations half lost to us. He makes the chorus of maidens in 
the Hippolytus sing?: 
‘O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall 
That Direce’s wells run under ; 
Ye know the Cyprian’s fleet foot-fall, 
Ye saw the heavens round her flare 
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair 
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there 
The Bride of the bladed thunder, 


For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air 
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.’ 





The thriambos* was then, if this conjecture be correct, the song 
of the Thriae or honey-priestesses, a song from the beginning like 
the analogous Dithyramb confused, inspired, impassioned. The 
title Dithyrambos through its etymology and by its traditional use 
belonged to Dionysos, conceived of in his twofold aspect as the 
nature-god born anew each year, the god of plants and animals as 
well as of human life, and also as the spirit of intoxication. It 
remains to ask what was the significance of such a god to the 
Greeks who received him as an immigrant from the North. How 
far did they adopt and how far modify both elements in this 
strange and complex new worship ? 


1 For a full account of ‘the Bee in Greek Mythology’ see Mr A. B. Cook, J.H.S, 
xy. 1895, p. 1. 2 Eur. Hipp. 555. 

% @piauBos translated by the Romans into the plain prose of ‘triumph’ seems to 
have remained to the Greeks a poetical word consecrated to poetical usage. Conon 
says indeed of Tereus in telling the story of Philomela: réuvec rhy adrijs y\Gooar 
deducss Tov Ex NOywr OplauBov (Narrat. xxxt.), but the story and the usage of the word 
seem borrowed from some poetical source. Sir Richard Jebb kindly draws my 
attention to the fact that in our earliest literary mention of the thriambos (Kratinos, 
Koch frg. 36) it is apparently sung by a female singer ; 

bre od rods KadXovds OpiduBous avaptrovo’ dmrnxAdvov. 


VIII | The ‘ Return to Nature’ 445 


First, what significance had Dionysos to the Greeks as a nature- 
god, in his animal and vegetable forms as bull and tree ? 


Long before the coming of Dionysos the Greeks had nature- 
' gods: they had Demeter goddess of the corn, they had Poseidon 
Phytalmios god of the growth of plants, they had the Charites 
givers of all increase. But it should be distinctly noted that all 
these and many another nature-god had passed into a state of 
complete anthropomorphism. They represent human rather than 
merely physical relations, they have cut themselves as far as possible 
loose from plant and animal nature.// Demeter is far more mother 
than corn. Hermes is the young {nan in his human splendour, 
and spite of his Herm-form and phallic worship has well nigh 
forgotten that he was once a spirit of generation in flocks and 
plants. Athene, like her mother the earth, had once for her 
vehicle a snake (p. 306), but she has waxed in glory till she 
comes to be a motherless splendour born of the brain of Zeus, an 
incarnate city of Athens. These magnificent Olympians have 
shed for ever the slough of animal shapes. Dionysos came to 
Greece at an earlier stage of his development when he was still 
half bull half tree, and this earlier stage was tolerated, even 
welcomed, by a people who had themselves outgrown it. 

It is not hard to see how this came to be. Man when he 
worships a bull or a tree has not, even to himself, consciously 
emerged as human. He is still to his own thinking brother of 
plants and animals. As he advances he gains but also loses, and 
must sometimes retrace his steps. The Greeks of the sixth 
century B.C. may well have been a little weary of their anthropo- 
morphic Olympians, tired of their own magnified reflection in the 
mirror of mythology, whether this image were distorted or halo- 
crowned. They had taken for their motto ‘Know Thyself, but at 
the fountain of self-knowledge no human soul has ever yet, 
quenched its thirst. With Dionysos, god of trees and plants as well 
as human life, there came a ‘return to nature, a breaking of bonds | 
and limitations and erystallizations, a desire for the life rather of 
the emotions than of the reason, a recrudescence it may be of animal 
passions. Nowhere is this return to nature more clearly seen than 
in the Bacchae! of Euripides. The Bacchants leave their human 





1 See Mr Gilbert Murray, Hurt pides p. Ixvii. 





446 Dionysos [ CH. 


homes, their human work and ordered life, their looms and 
distaffs, and are back with the wild things upon the mountains. 
In token of this their hair flows loose, they clothe themselves with 
the skin of beasts, they are girt with snakes, and crowned with ivy 
and wild briony, and leaving their human babes they suckle the 
young of wolves and deer’: 


‘And one a young fawn held, and one a wild 
Wolf-cub, and fed them with white milk and smiled 
In love, young mothers with a mother’s breast, 

And babes at home forgotten.’ 


Euripides, it may be, utters his own longing to be free from the 
tangle and stress of things human, but it is into the mouths of 
the chorus of Maenads that he puts the lovely song’: 


‘Will they ever come to me, ever again, 
The long, long dances, 
On through the dark till the dim stars wane? 
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream 
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam 
In the dim expanses ? 
O feet of a Fawn to the greenwood fled, 
Alone in the grass, and the loveliness ; 
Leap of the Hunted, no more in dread, 
Beyond the snares and the deadly press. 
Yet a voice still in the distance sounds, 
A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds, 
O wildly labouring, fiercely fleet, 
Onward yet by river and glen— 
Is it joy or terror ye storm-swift feet ?— 
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men, 
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green 
The little things of the woodland live unseen.’ 


Nor is it only that the Maenads escape from their humanity to 
worship on the mountain, they find there others, a strange congre- 


gation, that worship with them® : 
‘There 
Through the appointed hour, they made their prayer 
And worship of the Wand, with one accord 
Of heart, and cry “TIacchos, Bromios, Lord, 
God of God born!” And all the mountain felt 
And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt, 
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness ‘ 
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress.’ 


This notion of a return to nature‘ is an element in the worship 
Tee eee 


1 Bur. Bacch. 699. 2 Tb. 862. > Tb. 123: 

4 Nietzsche has drawn in this respect a contrast, beautiful and profoundly true, 
between the religion and art of Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo, careful to remain his 
splendid self, projects an image, a dream, and calls it god. It is illusion (Schein), its 
watchword is limitation (Maass), Know thyself, Nothing toomuch. Dionysos breaks 


Vvut | Intoxication rare among Greeks 447 


of Dionysos so simple, so moving and in a sense so modern that 


. . . SS —— 5 - 
we realize it without effort. It is harder to attain to anything 
like historical sympathy with the second element—that of intoxi- 
cation. 


It is not easy to deal with the worship of Dionysos without 
rousing in our own minds an instinctive protest. Intoxication to 
us now-a-days means not inspiration but excess and consequent 
degradation ; its associations are with crime, with the slums, with 
hereditary disease, with every form of abuse that abases man, not 
to the level of the beasts but far beneath them. 

In trying to understand how the Greeks felt towards Dionysos 
we must bear in mind one undoubted fact. The Greeks were 
not as a nation drunkards. Serious excess in drink is rare 
among southern nations, and the Greeks were no exception to the 
general rule. When they came in contact with northern nations 
like the Thracians, who drank deep and seriously, they were sur- 
prised and disgusted. 

Of this we have ample evidence, much of it drawn from the 
discussion in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus' on Wine and 
Wine-cups. The general tone of the discourse, while it is strongly 
in favour of drinking, is averse to drunkenness. ‘The men of old time 
were not wont to get drunk.’ The reason given is characteristically 
Greek; they disliked the unbridled license that ensued. It was well 
said by the inventors of proverbs, ‘ Wine has no rudder.’ Plato* in 
the sixth book of the Laws said it was unfitting for a man to drink 
to the point of drunkenness, except on the occasions of festivals of 
that god who was the giver of wine. An occasional and strictly 
defined license under the sanction of religion is widely different 
fom a general habit of intemperance. in the frst book of the 
‘Laws’, in speaking of various foreign nations Northern and Oriental, 
e.g. Celts, Iberians, Thracians, Lydians and Persians, he says 
‘nations of that sort make a practice of drunkenness.’ 

The Greek habit of drinking was marked off from that of the 
Thracians by two customs, they drank their wine in small cups 
all bonds; his motto is the limitless (Uebermaass), Excess, Kestasy. Das Individwum 
mit allen seinen Grenzen und Maassen ging hier in der Selbstvergessenheit der 
dionysischen Zustiinde unter, und vergass die apollinischen Satzungen (Nietzsche, 


Die Geburt der Vragédie, p. 37). 
1 Ath. x1. 31 § 427. 2 Plat. Legg. p. 775. ° Ib. p. 637. 


448 Dionysos [CH. 


and they mixed it freely with water. One of the guests in 
Athenaeus remarks! that it is worth while enquiring whether the 
men of old times drank out of large cups. ‘For, he adds, 
‘Dicaearchus the Messenian, the disciple of Aristotle, in his dis- 
course on Alcaeus says they used small cups and drank their wine 
mixed with much water. He goes on to cite a treatise ‘On 
Drunkenness’ by Chamaeleon of Heracleia, in which Chamaeleon 
stated not only that the custom of using large cups was a recent 
one but that it was imported from the barbarians. Imported 
indeed but never really naturalized, for he goes on to say, ‘ They 
being devoid of culture rush eagerly to excess in wine and 
provide for themselves all manner of superfluous delicacies.’ It 
is clear that in respect of wine and food as of everything else the 
Greek was in the main true to his motto ‘Nothing too much,’ 
Drunkenness was an offence in his eyes against taste as well as 
morals. 

Large drinking cups were a northern barbarian characteristic’; 
they were made originally of the huge horns of the large breed 
of cattle common in the North, they were set in silver and 
gold, and later sometimes actually made of precious metals and 
called rhyta. Chamaeleon goes on to say, ‘in the various regions 
of Greece neither in works of art nor in poems shall we find any 
trace of a large cup being made save in such as deal with heroes.’ 
That to the dead hero was allowed even by the Orphics the 
guerdon of ‘ eternal drunkenness’ will be seen later (Chap. X1.), but 
the living hero only drank of large cups of unmixed wine out of 
ceremonial courtesy to the Northerner. Xenophon in the seventh 
book of the Anabasis describes in detail the drinking festival 
given by the Thracian Seuthes. When the Greek general and 
his men came to Seuthes they embraced first and then according 
to the Thracian custom horns of wine were presented to them. 
In like manner the Macedonian Philip pledged his friends in 
a horn of wine. It was from silver horns that the Centaurs 
drank (p. 386). <A flatterer and a demagogue might drink deep 
for his own base purposes. Of the arch-demagogue Alcibiades 
Plutarch’ says: ‘At Athens he scoffed and kept horses, at Sparta 
he went close-shaved and wore a short cloak and washed in cold 


1 Ath. xr. 4 § 461. 2 Ath. xr. 51 § 476. 
3 Plut. De adul. et amic. vu. 


VIII | Intoxication rare among Greeks 449 


water, in Thrace he fought and drank.’ War and drink, Ares and 
Dionysos, have been in all ages the chosen divinities of the 
Northerner. Diodorus in speaking of ceremonial wine-drinking 
makes a characteristically Greek statement: ‘They say that those 
who drink at banquets when unmixed wine is provided invoke the 
Good Genius, but when after the meal wine is given mixed with 
water they call on the name of Zeus the Saviour; for they hold 
that wine drunk unmixed produces forms of madness, but that 
when it is mixed with the rain of Zeus the joy of it and the 
delight remain, and the injurious element that causes madness 
and license is corrected.’ The Good, or perhaps we ought to call 
him ‘Wealthy, Spirit is the very essence of the old wine-god of 
Thrace and Boeotia; the blendimg with the rain of Zeus is the 
taking of it over to the mildness and temperance of the Greek 
character. 


Excess was rare among the southern Greeks, and, even when 
they exceeded, because they were a people of artists they 
euphemized. No one but a Greek could have conceived the 
lovely little vase-painting from an oinochoé in the Boston Museum 





Fie. 138. 


of Fine Arts? in fig. 138. <A beautiful maiden is the centre 
of the scene. She is a worshipper of Dionysos. In her left 
hand is a tall thyrsos and she holds the cup of Dionysos, the 


1 Diod. tv. 3. 
2 Boston Museum Annual Report, 1901, p. 60, No. 20. P. Hartung, Strena 


Helbigiana, p. 111. 
29 
H. 


450 Dionysos [cH. 


kantharos, in her right. It is empty, and she seems to ask the 
Satyr who stands before her to refill it from his oiochoé. But 
he will not, she has had too much already. Over her beautiful 
head, slightly inclined as if in weariness, is inscribed—and who 
but a Greek would have dared to write it ?—her name ‘ Kraipale.’ 
Behind her comes a kindly sober friend bearing in her hand a hot 
drink, smoking still, to cure her sickness. 

Perhaps because the extreme of drunkenness, its after degra- 
dation and squalid ugliness, was rare among the Greeks, they were 
better able to realize that in its milder forms it lent lovely motives 
for art. Wine by the release it brings from self-consciousness 
unslacks the limbs and gives to pose and gesture the new beauty 
of abandonment. Degas has dared to seize and fix for ever the 
beauty he saw in that tragedy of degradation—a woman of the 
people besotted by absinthe. The peeping moralist that lurks in 
most of us intrudes to utter truth beside the mark and say that 
she is wicked. To the Greek artist there was no such extreme 
issue between art and morality. To him, whether poet or vase- 
painter, to drink and fall asleep was if not a common at least 
a beautiful experience, one he painted on many a vase and sang in 
many a song. A festival without the grace and glory of wine 
would to him have been shorn of well nigh all its goodliness, 
On this it is needless to insist. To him peace and wine and sleep 
are playfellows loving and lovely’: 


‘Eyelids closed and lulled heart deep 

In gentle, unforbidden sleep, 

Street by street the city brims 

With lovers’ feasts and burns with lovers’ hymns.’ 

Another point remains to be noted. Not only did the Greeks 
mix their Thracian wine with water, tempering the madness of 
the god, but they saw in Dionysos the god of spiritual as well as 
physical intoxication. It cannot be forgotten that the drama 
sprang from the religion of Dionysos; his nurses are not only 
Maenads, they are Muses; from him and him only comes the > 
beauty and magic of their song: 


‘Hail Child of Semele, only by thee 
Can any singing sweet and gracious be.’ 


The contrast between sheer Thracian madness and the Athenian 


1 Bacchyl. Paean, Bergk 13, trans. by Mr D. 8. MacColl. 


vil | Spiritual Intoxication 451 


notion of inspiration is very clearly seen in the two figures of 
Dionysos as represented on the two vase-paintings in fig, 139 and 
fig. 140, vase-paintings roughly contemporaneous, the first in the 


Te 
a < 
3 SS 


fe 
Ry 
d (in 


Fie. 139. 





style of Hieron, the second in that of Brygos. In fig. 139 from a red- 
figured stamnos! in the British Museum we have the Thracian 
Dionysos drunk with wine, a brutal though still splendid savage ; 
he dances in ecstasy brandishing the fawn he has rent asunder in his 
madness. In the second picture? (fig. 140), a masterpiece of decora- 
_ tive composition, we have Dionysos as the Athenian cared to know 
him. The strange mad Satyrs are twisted and contorted to make 
exquisite patterns, they clash their frenzied crotala and wave great 
vine branches. But in the midst of the revel the god himself 


1 Brit. Mus. Cat. £ 439, pl. xv. On the reverse a Satyr plays the flute to his 
master’s dancing. 


2 Bibliothéque Nationale, Cat. 576. P. Hartwig, Meisterschalen xxxut, 1 


29—2 


452 Dionysos [ CH. 


stands erect. He holds no kantharos, only a great lyre. His head 





Fie. 140. 


is thrown back in ecstasy; he is drunken, but with music, not with 
wine. 

Again, with the Maenad worshippers there is the same trans- 
formation. 

The delicate red-figured kotylos! in fig. 141 from the National 
Museum in Athens is like a little twofold text on the double 
aspect of the worship of Dionysos. On the obverse is a Maenad 
about to execute her old savage ritual of tearing a kid asunder. 
In a moment she will raise her bent head and chant?: 

‘O glad, glad on the Mountains 
To swoon in the race outworn, 
When the holy fawn-skin clings 
And all else sweeps away, 
To the joy of the quick red fountains, 
The blood of the hill-goat torn, 
The glory of wild-beast ravenings 
Where the hill-top catches the day, 
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains 
’Tis Bromios leads the way.’ 
1 Athens, Nat. Mus. Inv. 3442. Bull. de Corr. Hell. x1x. 1895, p. 94. 
2 Kur. Bacch. 135. 





ie.» 


Vir | Ecstasy and Asceticism 453 


On the reverse for counterpart is a sister Maenad. She dances 





in gentle ecstasy, playing on her great timbrel. She is all for the 
service of the Muses, and she might sing?: 
‘But a better land is there 
Where Olympus cleaves the air, 
The high still dell, where the Muses dwell, 
Fairest of all things fair. 


O there is Grace, and there is the Heart’s Desire, 
And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit of guiding Fire.’ 


There are some to whom by natural temperament the religion 
of Bromios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter, if 
not a stumbling-block. Food is to such a troublesome necessity, 
Wine a danger or a disgust. They dread all stimulus that comes 
from without, they would fain break the ties that link them with 
animals and plants. They do not feel in themselves and are at 
a loss to imagine for others the sacramental mystery of life and 
nutrition that is accomplished in us day by day, how in the faint- 
ness of fasting the whole nature of man, spirit as well as body, 
dies down, he cannot think, he cannot work, he cannot lovey how 
in the breaking of bread, and still more in the drinking of wine, 
life spiritual as well as physical is renewed, thought is re-born, 
his equanimity, his magnanimity are restored, reason and morality 


1 Kur. Bacch. 409. 


454 Dionysos [CH. VII 


rule again. But to this sacramentalism of life most of us bear 
constant, if partly unconscious, witness. We will not eat with 
the man we hate, it is felt a sacrilege leaving a sickness in body 
and soul. The first breaking of bread and drinking of wine 
together is the seal of a new friendship; the last eaten in silence 
at parting is more than many words. The sacramental feast of 
bread and wine is spread for the newly married, for the newly 
dead. 

Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of 
sudden illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human 
charity and understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of 
other temperament is so’ natural, so elemental, so beautiful—the 
constant shift from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of 
the religion of Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are 
saintly souls, who know it all to the full, know the exhilaration of 
wine, know what it is to be drunken with the physical beauty of 
a flower or a sunset, with the sensuous imagery of words, with the 
strong wine of a new idea, with the magic of another’s personality, 
yet having known, turn away with steadfast eyes, disallowing the 
madness not only of Bromios but of the Muses and of Aphrodite. 
Such have their inward ecstasy of the ascetic, but they revel with 
another Lord, and he is Orpheus. 


CHAPTER IX. 


ORPHEUS. 
“TOAAO! MEN NAPOHKOMOPO!, TaYpo! Aé Te Bakyol.’ 


MyTHo.oey has left us no tangle more intricate and assuredly 
no problem half so interesting as the relation between the 
ritual and mythology of Orpheus and Dionysos. 

By the time of Herodotus! the followers of Orpheus and of 
Bacchus are regarded as substantially identical. In commenting 
on the taboo among the Egyptians against being buried in 
woollen garments he says: ‘In this respect they agree with the 
rites which are called Bacchic and Orphic but are really Egyptian 
and Pythagorean.’ The identification is of course a rough and 
ready one, an identification of race on the precarious basis of a 
similarity of rites, but one thing is clear to the mind of Hero- 
dotus—Orphic and Bacchic and Egyptian rites are either identical 
or closely analogous. The analogy between Orpheus and Bacchus 
passed by the time of Euripides into current language. Theseus? 
when he would taunt Hippolytus with his pseudo-asceticism says : 


‘Go revel thy .Bacchic rites 
With Orpheus for thy Lord, 

and Apollodorus? in his systematic account of the Muses states 
that Orpheus ‘invented the mysteries of Dionysos.’ The sever- 
ance of the two figures by modern mythologists has often led 
to the misconception of both. The full significance, the higher 
spiritual developments of the religion of Dionysos are only 

1 Herod. 1. 81 duoroyéovar 6é radra Toto. Opdixotor kadevpévoror kal Baxyekoior, 
éovor d€ Aiyumtioor kai Ilvfaryopeiace. 

2 Kur. Hipp. 954 

Oppéa 7’ avakr’ éxwv 


Baxxeve. 
3 Apollod. fr. 3. 2, 3. « 


ee 


456 Orpheus [ CH. 


understood through the doctrine of Orpheus, and the doctrine 
of Orpheus apart from the religion of Dionysos is a dead letter. 
And yet, clearly linked though they are, the most superficial 
survey reveals differences so striking as to amount to a spiritual 
antagonism. Orpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at almost every point 
seems to contradict him. The sober gentle musician, the precise 
almost pedantic theologist, is no mere echo, no reincarnation 
of the maddened, maddening wine-god. Diodorus expresses a 
truth that must have struck every thinker among the Greeks, 
that this real and close resemblance veiled an inner, intimate 
discrepancy. He says’, in telling the story of Lycurgus, ‘ Charops, 
grandfather of Orpheus, gave help to the god, and Dionysos in 
gratitude instructed him in the orgies of his rites; Charops handed 
them down to his son Oiagros, and Oiagros to his son Orpheus.’ 
Then follow the significant words: ‘Orpheus, being a man gifted 
by nature and highly trained above all others, made many 
modifications in the orgiastic rites: hence they call the rites that 
took their rise from Dionysos, Orphic.’ Diodorus seems to have 


; put his finger on the secret of Orpheus. He comes later than 


Dionysos, he is a man not a god, and his work is to modify the 


rites of the god he worshipped. 


It is necessary at the outset to emphasize the humanity of 
Orpheus. About his legend has gathered much that is miraculous 
and a theory? has been started and supported with much learning 
and ability, a theory which sees in Orpheus an underworld god, 
the chthonic counterpart of Dionysos, and that derives his name 
from chthonic darkness (6pgvn). This is to my mind to mis- 
conceive the whole relation between the two. 


ORPHEUS AS MacicaL MUSICIAN. 


Like the god he served, Orpheus is at one part of his career a 
Thracian, unlike him a magical musician. Dionysos, as has been 
seen (p. 452), played upon the lyre, but music was never of his 
essence, 

In the matter of Thracian music we are happily on firm 


1 Diod. 111. 65 ronda meTabetvar rwv ev Tots dpylos. 
2 E. Maass, Orpheus. To Dr Maass’s learned book I owe much, but I am 
reluctantly compelled to differ from his main contention. 


Ix] Orpheus a Thracian 457 


ground. The magical musician, whose figure to the modern mind 
has almost effaced the theologist, comes as would be expected 
from the home of music, the North. Conon? in his life of 
Orpheus says expressly, ‘the stock of the Thracians and Mace- 
donians is music-loving.’ Strabo* too is explicit on this point. 
In the passage already quoted (p. 415), on the strange musical 
instruments used in the orgies of Dionysos, he says: ‘Similar to 
these (i.e. the rites of Dionysos) are the Kotyttia and Bendideia 
practised among the Thracians, and with them also Orphic rites 
had their beginning. A little further he goes on to say that the 
Thracian origin of the worship of the Muses is clear from the 
places sacred to their cult. ‘For Pieria and Olympus and Pimplea 
and Leibethra were of old Thracian mountains and districts, but 
are now held by the Macedonians, and the Thracians who colonized 
Boeotia consecrated Helicon to the Muses and also the cave of the 
Nymphs called Leibethriades. And those who practised ancient 
music are said to have been Thracians, Orpheus and Musaeus and 
Thamyris, and the name Eumolpus comes from Thrace.’ 

The statement of Strabo is noticeable. As Diodorus places 
Orpheus two generations later than Dionysos, so the cult of the 
Muses with which Orpheus is associated seems chiefly to prevail 
in Lesbos and among the Cicones of Lower Thrace and Mace- 
donia. We’ do not hear of Orpheus among the remote inland 
Bessi. This may point to a somewhat later date of development 
when the Thracians were moving southwards. That there were 
primitive and barbarous tribes living far north who practised 
music we know again from Strabo. He tells* of an Illyrian tribe, 
the Dardanii, who were wholly savage and lived in caves they 
dug under dung-heaps, but all the same they were very musical 
and played a great deal on pipes and stringed instruments. The 
practice of music alone does not even now-a-days necessarily mark 
a high level of culture, and the magic of Orpheus was, as will 
later be seen, much more than the making of sweet sounds. 

Orpheus, unlike Dionysos, remained consistently a Northerner. 
We have no universal spread of his name, no fabulous pirth stories 
everywhere, no mystic Nysa; he does not take whole nations by 

| storm, he is always known to be an immigrant and is always of the 
; 


s 1 Conon, Narr. xty. ¢iAduovcov 7a Opdxwv Kal Maxeddven yévos. 
a: 2 Strabo x. 3 § 722. 3 Strabo vir. 7 § 315. 


458 Orpheus [ CH. 


few. At Thebes we hear of magical singers Zethus and Amphion, 
but not of Orpheus. In Asia he seems never to have prevailed ; 
the orgies of Dionysos and the Mother remained in Asia in their 
primitive Thracian-savagery. It is in Athens that he mainly 
re-emerges. 


To the modern mind the music of Orpheus has become mainly 
fabulous, a magic constraint over the wild things of nature. 


‘Orpheus with his lute made trees 
And the mountain tops that freeze 
Bow themselves when he did sing.’ 


This notion of the fabulous music was already current in 
antiquity. The Maenads in the Bacchae’ call to their Lord to 
come from Parnassos, 


‘Or where stern Olympus stands 
In the elm woods or the oaken, 
There where Orpheus harped of old, 
And the trees awoke and knew him, 
And the wild things gathered to him, 
As he sang among the broken 
Glens his music manifold,’ 
and again in the lovely song of the Alcestis®, the chorus sing to 
Apollo who is but another Orpheus : 


‘And the spotted lynxes for joy of thy song 
Were as sheep in the fold, and a tawny throng 
Of lions trooped down from Othrys’ lawn, 

And her light foot lifting, a dappled fawn 
Left the shade of the high-tressed pine, 
And danced for joy to that lyre of thine.’ 

In Pompeian wall-paintings and Graeco-Roman sarcophagi it 
is as magical musician, with power over all wild untamed things 
in nature, that Orpheus appears. This conception naturally passed 
into Christian art and it is interesting to watch the magical 
musician transformed gradually into the Good Shepherd. The 
bad wild beasts, the lions and lynxes, are weeded out one by one, 
and we are left, as in the wonderful Ravenna*® mosaic, with only a 
congregation of mild patient sheep. 

It is the more interesting to find that on black and red-figured 
vase-paintings, spite of this literary tradition, the power of the 
magical musician is quite differently conceived. Orpheus does 

? Bur. Bacch. 560. 2 Kur, Ale. 579. 


* In the Church of 8. Apollinare in Classe. See Kurth, Mosaiken von der 
christlich. Era, Taf. xxvu. 


1x] Orpheus as Magical Musician 459 


not appear at all on black-figured vases—again a note of his late 
eoming—and on red-figured vases never with the attendant wild 
beasts. 

On a vase found at Gela and now in the Berlin Museum!, 
reproduced in fig. 142, we have Orpheus as musician. He wears 
Greek dress and sits playing on his lyre with up-turned head, 
utterly aloof, absorbed. And round him are not wild beasts but 





Fie. 142. 


wild men, Thracians. They wear uniformly the characteristic 
Thracian dress, the fox-skin cap and the long embroidered cloak, 
of both of which Herodotus? makes mention as characteristic. 
The Thracians who joined the Persian expedition, he says, ‘ wore 
fox-skins on their heads and were clothed with various-coloured 
cloaks. These wild Thracians in the vase-painting are all intent 
on the music; the one to the right looks suspicious of this new 
magic, the one immediately facing Orpheus is determined to 
enquire into it, the one just behind has gone under completely ; 
his eyes are shut, his head falling, he is mesmerized, drunken but 
not with wine. 

This beautiful picture brings to our minds very forcibly one 

1 Berlin Mus. Cat. 3172; Progr. Winckelmannsfeste, Berlin, No. 50, Taf. 11.; 


Roscher, Lexicon, vol. mm. p. 1179. 
2 Herod. vi. 75. 


460 Orpheus [ CH. 


note of Orpheus, as contrasted with Dionysos, his extraordinary 


quiet. Orpheus never plays the flute ‘that rouses to madness’ 


nor clangs the deafening cymbals; he plays always gn the quiet 
lyre, and he is never disturbed or distraught by his own music. 
He is the very mirror of that ‘orderliness and grave earnestness’ 
(raéts Kat o7ovdy) which, as we have seen (p. 441), Plutarch took 
to be the note of Apollo. Small wonder that Apollo was imaged 
as Orpheus. 

Orpheus, before the dawn of history, had made his home in 
Thrace. His music is all of the North, but after all, though 
mythology always emphasizes this music, it was not the whole 
secret of his influence. He was more priest than musician. More- 
over, though Orpheus has certain Apolline touches, the two figures 
are not really the least like. About Apollo there is no atmosphere 
of mysticism, nothing mysterious and ineffable; he is all sweet 
reasonableness and lucidity. Orpheus came to Thrace and thence 
to Thessaly, but he came, I believe, from the South. It will later 
be seen that his religion in its most primitive form is best studied 
in Crete. In Crete and perhaps there only is found that strange 
blend of Egyptian and primitive Pelasgian which found its ex- 
pression in Orphic ritgs. Diodorus says Orpheus went to Egypt 
to learn his ritual and theology, but in reality there was no need 
to leave his native island. From Crete by the old island route® 
he- passed northwards, leaving his mystic rites as he passed at 
Paros, at Samos, at Samothrace, at Lesbos. At Maroneia among 
the Cicones he met the vine-god, among the Thracians he-learnt 
his music. All this is by anticipation. That Crete was the home 
of Orphism will best be seen after examination of the mysteries of 
Orpheus (p. 565). For the present we must be content to examine 
his mythology. 

The contrast between Orpheus and Dionysos is yet more 
vividly emphasized in the vase-painting* next to be considered 
(fig. 143), from a red-figured hydria of rather late style. Again 
Orpheus is the central figure, and again a Thracian in his long 
embroidered cloak and fox-skin cap is listening awe-struck. It is 

1 Diod. rv. 25. 
* These wanderings by sea may perhaps be reflected in the voyage of the 
Argonauts. 


® Roscher, Lexicon, vol. 11. p. 1181, fig. 5. The vase was formerly in the 
Dutuit collection. 


1x] The Death of Orpheus 461 


noticeable that in this and all red-figured vases of the fine period 
Orpheus is dressed as a Greek; he has been wholly assimilated, 
nothing in hjs dress marks him from Apollo. It is not till a very 
late date, and chiefly in Lower Italy, that the vase-painter shows 
himself an archaeologist and dresses Orpheus as a Thracian priest. 
Not only a Thracian but a Satyr looks and listens entranced. 





Fie. 143. 


But this time Orpheus will not work his magic will. He may 
tame the actual Thracian, he may tame the primitive population 
of Thrace mythologically conceived of as Satyrs, but the real 
worshipper of Dionysos is untameable as yet. Up from behind in 
hot haste comes a Maenad armed with a great club, and we foresee 
the pitiful end. 


THE DEATH OF ORPHEUS. 


The story of the slaying of Orpheus by the Thracian women, 
the Maenads, the Bassarids, is of cardinal importance. It was the 
subject of a lost play by Aeschylus, but vases of the severe red- 
figured style remain our earliest extant source. Manifold reasons, 
to suit the taste of various ages, were of course invented to account 
for the myth. Some said Orpheus was slain by Zeus because 
Prometheus-like he revealed mysteries to man. When love came 
into fashion he suffers for his supposed sin against the Love-God. 
Plato! made him be done to death by the Maenads, because, 
instead of dying for love of Eurydice, he went down alive into 
Hades. But serious tradition always connected his death somehow 


1 Plat. Symp. 179c. Phanocles (ap. Stob. serm. uxiv.) makes Orpheus suffer for 
his introduction of paiderastia, the introduction of which is attributed by Aristotle 
(Pol. 11. 10) to the Cretan Minos. 


462 Orpheus [ CH. 


with the cult of Dionysos. According to one account he died 
the death of Dionysos himself. Proklos! in his commentary on 
Plato says: ‘Orpheus, because he was the leader in the rites of 
Dionysos, is said to have suffered the like fate to his god.” It 
will later be shown in discussing Orphic mysteries (p. 484) that 
an important feature in Dionysiac religion was the rending and 
death of the god, and no doubt to the faithful it seemed matter of 
edification that Orpheus, the priest of his mysteries, should suffer 
the like passion. 

But in the myth of the death by the hands of the Maenads 
there is another element, possibly with some historical kernel, the 
element of hostility between the two cults, the intimate and 
bitter hostility of thmgs near akin. The Maenads tear Orpheus 
to pieces, not because he is an incarnation of their god, but 
because he despises them and they hate him. This seems to 
have been the form of the legend followed by Aeschylus. It is 
recorded for us by Eratosthenes?. ‘He (Orpheus) did not honour 
- Dionysos but accounted Helios the greatest of the gods, whom 
also he called Apollo. And rising up early in the morning he 
climbed the mountain called Pangaion and waited for the rising of 
the sun that he might first catch sight of it. Therefore Dionysos 
was enraged and sent against him his Bassarids, as Aeschylus 
the poet says. And they tore him to pieces and cast his limbs 
asunder. But the Muses gathered them together and buried 
them in the place called Leibethra.” Orpheus was a reformer, 
a protestant; there is always about him a touch of the reformer’s 
priggishness ; it is impossible not to sympathize a little with the 
determined looking Maenad who is coming up behind to put a 
stop to all this sun-watching and lyre-playing. 

The devotion of Orpheus to Helios is noted also in the 
hypothesis to the Orphic Lithika®. Orpheus was on his way up 
a mountain to perform an annual sacrifice in company with some 

1 Prokl. ad Plat. Polit. p. 398 ’Opdeds are rwv Acovicou TeXer wv aryeudv yevduevos 
Ta Gora mabey Néyerar TH operepw Dew. 

2 Kratosth. Catast. xxtv. Since the above was written M. Salomon Reinach’s 
interesting paper ‘La Mort d’Orphée (Rev. Arch, 1902, p. 242) has appeared. He 
sees in Orpheus a fox-totem of the Bassarids. But the traits of Orpheus re- 
corded by tradition seem to me exclusively homan. I am more inclined to see in 
his dismemberment tbe echo of some tradition of ‘secondary burial,’ such as is 
known to have been practised in primitive Egypt and, significantly, in Crete, at 


Palaiokastro. See J. H. S. 1902, p. 386, 
8 Hypoth. ad Orph. Lith. 


Ix] Orpheus and Helios 463 


friends when he met Theiodamas. He tells Theiodamas the 
origin of the custom. When Orpheus was a child he was nearly 
killed by a snake and he took refuge in a neighbouring sanctuary 
of Helios. The father of Orpheus instituted the sacrifice and 
when his father left the country Orpheus kept it up. Theiodamas 
waits till the ceremony is over, and then follows the discourse on 
precious stones. 

That there was a Thracian cult of the Sun-god later fused 
with that of Apollo is certain. Sophocles! in the Tereus made 
some one say: 

‘O Helios, name 
To Thracian horsemen dear, O eldest flame !’ 
Helios was a favourite of monotheism, as we learn from another 
fragment of Sophocles?: 
‘Helios, have pity on me, 
Thou whom the wise men call the sire of gods 
And father of all things.’ 

The ‘wise men’ here as in many other passages* may actually 
be Orphic teachers, anyhow they are specialists in theology. 
Helios, as all-father, has the air of late speculation, but such 
speculations are often only the revival in another and modified 
form of a primitive faith. By the time of Homer, Helios had 
sunk to a mere impersonation of natural fact, but he may 
originally have been a potent sky god akin to Keraunios and to 
Ouranos, who was himself effaced by Zeus. Orpheus was, as will 
later be seen, a teacher of monotheism, and it was quite in his 
manner to attempt the revival of an ancient and possibly purer 
faith. 


Be this as it may, it is quite certain that ancient tradition | 


made him the foe of Dionysos and the victim of the god’s wor- 
shippers. His death at their hands is depicted on numerous 
vase-paintings of which a typical instance is given in fig. 144, The 
design is from a red-figured stamnos in the Museo Gregoriano of 
the Vatican’. The scheme is usually much the same; we have 
the onset of the Thracian women bearing clubs or double axes 


1 Soph. frg. 523. 

2 Soph, frg. 1017. The attribution to Sophocles is doubtful. 

3 Bvidence of the use of of cogoi to indicate the Orphics has been collected 
by Dr J. Adam in his edition of the Republic, Vol. 11. p, 378. 

4 Museo Gregoriano 1. 60.1; Roscher, Lexicon mt. p. 1187, fig. 12. 


464 Orpheus [ CH. 


or great rocks for weapons. Usually they are on foot, but on the 
Vatican stamnos one Maenad appears mounted, Amazon fashion. 
Before this fierce onset the beau- 
tiful musician falls helpless, his 
only weapon of defence the in- 
nocent lyre. On a cylix! with 
white ground about the date of 
Euphronios, the Thracian Maenad 
who slays Orpheus is tattooed; 
on the upper part of her mght 
arm is clearly marked a little 
stag. Popular aetiology connected 
this tattooing -with the death of 

Orpheus. The husbands of the Laie 


wicked women tattooed them as Nu ee 
a punishment for their crime, penteic 7 A TAALL/ 


and all husbands continued the 
practice down to the time of Fic, 144, 
Plutarch. Plutarch? says he 
‘cannot praise them,’ as long protracted punishment is ‘the prero- 
gative of the Deity. Prof, Ridgeway*® has shown that the practice 
of tattooing was in use among the primitive Pelasgian population 
but never adopted by the Achaeans. 
The Maenads triumphed for a time. 

‘What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, 

The Muse herself for her enchanting son, 

Whom universal nature did lament, 

When by the rout that made the hideous roar 


His gory visage down the stream was sent, 
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?’ 










fs 
ig 
Ke 


“en ey 







The dismal savage tale comes to a gentle close. The head of 
Orpheus, singing always, is found by the Muses, and buried in 
the sanctuary at Lesbos. Who are the Muses? Who but the 
Maenads repentant, clothed and in their right minds. 


1 J, H. S. 1888, pl. 1. On another vase in the British Museum (Cat. © 301) 
a Maenad pursuing Orpheus is tattooed on the right arm and both insteps with 
a ladder- like pattern. 

2 Plut. de ser. num. vind, x11. ovdé yap Opaxas émawoduev bre orifovew axpe viv 
Tiywpodvres ‘Oper tas air&v yuvaikas, and Phanocles ap. Stob. Florileg. p. 399 
v. 13 says: 

mowas & "Oppnt krauévw orlfovor yuvatcas 
, els Ere viv xelvns elvexev aurdaxlys. 
% Karly Age of Greece, vol. 1. p. 398. 


— 


Ix] Hero-shrine of Orpheus 465 


That Maenads and Muses, widely diverse though they seem 
to us, were not by classical writers sharply sundered is seen in the 
variant versions of the story of Lycurgus. Dionysos in Homer is 
attended by his nurses (ti@nvav) and these, as has already been 
shown (p. 402), are Maenads, but, when we come to Sophocles, 
these same nurses, these ‘ god-inspired’ women, are not Maenads, 
but Muses. The chorus in the Antigone’ sings of Lycurgus; 
how he 


‘Set his hand 
To stay the god-inspired woman-band, 
To quell his Women and his joyous fire, 
And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.’ 

Nor is it poetry only that bears witness. In the introduction 
to the eighth book of his Symposiacs Plutarch? is urging the 
importance of mingling improving conversation with the drinking 
of wine. ‘It is a good custom,’ he says, ‘that our women have, 
who in the festival of the Agrionia seek for Dionysos as though he 
had run away, and then they give up seeking and say that he has 
taken refuge with the Muses and is lurking with them, and after 
some time when they have finished their feast they ask each 
other riddles and conundrums (aiviypata kal ypidovs). And this 
mystery teaches us..... In some secret Bacchic ceremonial extant 
in the days of Plutarch and carried on by women only, Dionysos 
was supposed to be in the hands of his women attendants, but 
they were known as Muses not as Maenads. The shift of Maenad 
to Muse is like the change of Bacchic rites to Orphic; it is the 
informing of savage rites with the spirit of music, order and peace. 


THE HERO-SHRINE OF ORPHEUS. 


Tradition says that Orpheus was buried by the Muses, 
and fortunately of his burial-place we know some definite par- 
ticulars. It is a general principle in mythology that the re- 
puted death-place of a god or hero is of more significance than 
his birth-place, because, among a people like the Greeks, who 
practised hero-worship, it is about the death-place and the tomb 
that cultus is set up. The birth-place may have a mythical 


1 Soph. Ant. 962. 2 Plut. Symp. vit. Proem. 
H. 30 


\ 


466 ‘ 


sanctity, but it is at the death-place that we can best study 
ritual practice. 

Philostratos* in the Heroicus says: ‘After the outrage of the 
women the head of Orpheus reached Lesbos and dwelt in a cleft 
of the island and gave oracles in the hollow earth.’ It is clear 
that we have here some form of Nekyomanteion, oracle of the dead. 
Of such there were many scattered all over Greece ; in fact, as has 
already been seen (p. 341), the tomb of almost any hero might 
become oracular. The oracular tomb of Orpheus became of wide 
repute. Inquirers, Philostratos? tells us, came to it even from 
far-off Babylon. It was from the shrine of Orpheus in Lesbos 
that in old days there came to Cyrus the brief, famous utterance: 
‘Mine, O Cyrus, are thine.’ 

Lucian® adds an important statement. In telling the story of 
the head and the lyre he says: ‘The head they buried at the 
place where now they have a sanctuary of Bacchus. The lyre on 
the other hand was dedicated in a sanctuary of Apollo.’ The 
statement carries conviction. It would have been so easy to bury 
head and lyre together. The truth probably was that the lyre 
was a later decorative addition to an old head-oracle story; the 
head was buried in the shrine of the god whose religion Orpheus 
reformed. 

Antigonus‘ in his ‘ History of Wonderful Things’ records a 
lovely tradition. He quotes as his authority Myrtilos, who wrote 
a treatise on Lesbian matters. Myrtilos said that, according to 
the local tradition, the tomb of the head of Orpheus was shown at 
Antissaia, and that the nightingales sang there more sweetly than 
elsewhere. In those wonder-loving days a bird had but to perch 
upon a tomb and her song became a miracle. 

The oracle shrine of Orpheus is depicted for us on a some- 
what late red-figured cylix of which the obverse® is reproduced in 
fig. 145. It is our earliest definite source for his cult. The head 
of Orpheus is prophesying with parted lips. We are reminded of 


Orpheus [ CH. 


1 Philostr. Her. v. § 704 7 Kepani) yap pera TO Tay yuvaikav épyov és AéoBov 
KaTadoxXoUTa priya THs Per ik wKure Kal ev ol\y T YN Expnomm@der. 


2 Philostr. Her. v. § 704. ® Lucian adv. indoct. 11. 
+ Antiq. Hist. Mir. v. 
5 Minervini, Bull. Arch. Nap. vol. v1. 1857, Tav. rv.; Roscher, Lexicon 111. 


p. 1178, fig. 3. The vase was last seen by Prof. Furtwiingler in the Barone 
collection ; where it now is I am unable to say. On the reverse of the vase (not 
figured here) a Muse is handing a lyre to a woman. 


s. 


IX] aoe of Orpheus 467 


the vase-painting in ae 10, where the head of Teiresias emerges 
bodily from the sacrificial trench near which Odysseus is seated. 
A youth has come to consult the oracle and holds in his hands a 
tablet and style. Whether he is putting down his own question 





Fic. 145. 


or the god’s answer is uncertain. We know from Plutarch* that 
at the oracle shrine of another hero, Mopsos, questions were some- 
times sent in on sealed tablets. In the case cited by Plutarch a 
test question was set and the oracle proved equal to the occasion. 
The vase-painting calls to mind the lines in the Alcestis of 
Euripides where the chorus sings*: 


‘Though to high heaven I fly, 
Borne on the Muses’ wing, 
Thinking great thoughts, yet do I find no thing 
Stronger than stern Necessity. 
No—not the spell 
On Thracian tablets legible 
That from the voice of Orpheus fell, 
Nor those that Phoebus to Asklepios gave 
That he might weary woe-worn mortals save.’ 


Orpheus on the vase-painting is a voice (yfpus) and nothing 
more. As to the tablets, if we may trust the scholiast on the 
passage, tablets accredited to Orpheus actually existed. He 
quotes Herakleitos‘ the philosopher as stating that Orpheus ‘set 


1 Plut. de defect. orac. Xv. 

2 The scholiast on the Plutus of Aristophanes v. 39, commenting on the words 
eakev ex oTeumdrwv, Says that persons who consulted an oracle made their inquiries 
of the god in writing. They wrote on a tablet (év rvxriw) placed in the shrine for 
that purpose and wreathing it with garlands gave it to the divining priest. But 
this information has an apocryphal air. 

3 Kur. Alc. 962. : 

4 Schol. ad Eur. Alc. 968 6 6€ gvoixds “Hpdixderros...ypagwv ottrws ‘70 dé Tod 
Awvicov Kkatecxevactae éml THs Opaxns emt Tod KaXovpévov Aluov, drov bn Twas év 
cavicw davaypagpas cival pac.’ 


30—2 


468 Orpheus [ CH. 


in order the religion of Dionysos in Thrace on Mount Haemus, 
where they say there are certain writings of his on tablets.’ 
There is no reason to doubt the tradition, and it serves to 
emphasize the fact that Orpheus was an actual person, living, 
teaching, writing, writing perhaps in those old ‘Pelasgian’ 
characters which Linos used long before the coming of Phoenician 
letters, characters which it may be are those still undeciphered 
which have come to light in Crete’. 

Above the head of Orpheus in the vase-painting (fig. 145) 
stands Apollo. In his left hand he holds his prophetic staff of 
laurel, his right is outstretched, but whether to command or 
forbid is hard to say. A curious account of the oracle on Lesbos 
given by Philostratos* in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana informs 
us that the relations of Apollo and Orpheus were not entirely 
peaceable. Apollonius, says Philostratos, landed at Lesbos and 
visited the adyton of Orpheus. They say that in this place of 
old Orpheus was wont to take pleasure in prophecy until Apollo 
took the oversight himself. For masmuch as men no longer 
resorted to Gryneion for oracles nor to Klaros nor to the place of 
the tripod of Apollo, but the head of Orpheus, recently come from 
Thrace, alone gave responses, the god came and stood over him as 
he uttered oracles and said: ‘Cease from the things that are mine, 
for long enough have I borne with thee and thy singing.’ Apollo 
will brook no rivalry even of his most faithful worshipper. The 
quaint story is evidence of the intolerance of a dominant and 
missionary cult. 

Most circumstantial of all accounts of Orpheus is that given 
by Conon*. No one would of course accept as evidence en bloc the 
statements of Conon, concerned as he mainly is to compile a 
complete and interesting story. Certain of his statements however 
have an inherent probability which makes them of considerable 


1 According to Diodorus, Linos and Orpheus both used ‘Pelasgic’ letters, and 
in them Linos wrote the deeds of Dionysos. révd oty Alvov act rots ILleXacytKots 
ypdupace ouvtaéduevoy Tas Tov mpwrov Acovicov mpdéers Kal Tas a\Nas puPodoylas 
amoNurety év Tots Vropyjnuacw. dmolws dé To’ToLs xphoacGat Tots IleNacyiKots ypdumace 
Tov ’Oppéa. 

2 Philostr. Vit. Apoll. xrv. 151. Dr Deubner (de Incubat. p. 11) notes that 
éplioracac is the regular word used for sudden divine apparitions. 

8’ Conon, Narr. xty. The narrative concludes thus: AaBdvres oby (Thy Kedadyr) 
brd onuate meyddw Oamrovor, Témevos al’rw meprelpeavres, 5 Téws ev Hpwov Hv, Uorepor 
& efevixnoey iepdv evar’ Ovolats re yap Kal boos dArNots Oeol TYudvTar yepalperac: 
Zort 6€ yuvatél mavred@s dBarov. 


Ix] Hero-shrine of Orpheus 469 


value. He devotes to Orpheus the whole of one of his narrations. 
He tells all the orthodox details, how Orpheus won the hearts of 
Thracians and Macedonians by his music, how he charmed rocks 
and trees and wild beasts and even the heart of Kore, queen of 
the underworld. Then he proceeds to the story of the death. 
Orpheus refused to reveal his mysteries to women, whom since 
the loss of his own wife he had hated en masse. The men of 
Thrace and Macedonia were wont to assemble in arms on certain 
fixed days, in a building at Leibethra of large size and well 
arranged for the purpose of the celebration of rites. When they 
went in to celebrate their orgiastic rites they laid down their arms 
before the entrance gate. The women watched their opportunity, 
seized the arms, slew the men and tore Orpheus to pieces, throwing 
his limbs into the sea. There was the usual pestilence in con- 
sequence and the oracular order that the head of Orpheus should 
be buried. After some search the head was found by a fisherman 
at the mouth of the river Meles. ‘It was still singing nor had it 
suffered any change from the sea, nor any other of the outrages 
that the Keres which beset mortals inflict on the dead, but it was 
still blooming and even then after the long lapse of time it was 
bleeding with fresh blood.’ Other stories of bleeding miraculous 
heads occur in antiquity. Aelian? records several and Phlegon? in 
his ‘ Wonders’ tells of the miracle that happened at the battle 
against Antiochus in 191 4.pD. <A bleeding head gave an oracle in 
elegiac verse and very wisely ordained that the spectators were 
not to touch it but only to listen. 

The details supplied by Conon are of course aetiological, but 
we seem to discern behind them some possible basis of historical 
fact, somegputrage of the wild women of Thrace against a real 
immigrant p shet in whose reforms they saw contempt of their 
rites. The blood of some real martyr may have been the seed of 
the new Orphic church. How this came to be Conon at the end 
of his narrative explains: ‘When the miraculous head, singing 
and bleeding, was found, they took it and buried it beneath 
a great monument and fenced it in with a sacred precinct, a 
precinct that no woman might ever enter.’ The significant state- 


1 Ael. V. H. xu. 8. 

2 Phleg. Mirab. ur. It is possible that the trait of the severed head was 
borrowed from the ritual of Adonis at Byblos. See C. Fries, N. Jahrb. Kl. Alt. v1. 
1903, Heft 1. 


470 Orpheus [ CH. 


ment is added that the tomb with its precinct was at first a 
heroén, but later it obtained as a hieron and the proof was that it 
was honoured with burnt sacrifices (@vciais) and all the other 
meeds of the gods. 


Conon has undoubtedly put his finger on the truth. Orpheus 
was a real man, a mighty singer, a prophet and a teacher, 
bringing with him a new religion, seeking to reform an old one. 
He was martyred and after his death his tomb became a mantic 
shrine. So long as it was merely a hero shrine the offermgs were 
those proper to the dead (€vayicuara), but an effort was made by 
the faithful to raise him to the rank of an upperworld Olympian. 
Locally burnt sacrifices, the meed of the Olympians of the upper 
air, were actually no doubt offered, but the cult of Orpheus as 
a god did not obtain. Translation to the Upper House of the 
Olympians was not always wholly promotion. What you gain as 
a personage you are apt to lose as a personality. Orpheus 
sacrificed divinity to retain his beautiful humanity. He is some- 
where on the same plane with Herakles and Asklepios (p. 347), 
too human ever to be quite divine. But the escape was a narrow 
one. Probably if a greater than he, Apollo, had not ‘taken the 
oversight,’ the sequel would have been otherwise. 

Conon writing in the time of Augustus believed Orpheus 
to have been a real man. So did Strabo. In describing the 
Thermaean gulf he says that the city of Dium is not on the 
coast but about seven stadia distant and ‘near the city of Dium 
is a village called Pimpleia where Orpheus lived.... Orpheus 
was of the tribe of the Cicones and was a man of magical power 
both as regards music and divination. He went about practising 
orgiastic rites and later, waxing self-confident, he obtaimed many 
followers and great influence. Some accepted him willingly, 
others, suspecting that he meditated violence and conspiracy, 
attacked and slew him.’ He adds that ‘in olden times prophets 
were wont to practise the art of music also.’ 

Still more completely human is the picture that Pausanias’® 
draws of the life and work of Orpheus. In the monument to 
Orpheus that he saw on Mt. Helicon the spell-bound beasts are 
listening to the music, and by the musician's side is the figure 


1 Strab. viz. frgs. 17, 18 and 19. a Pe, oO 1a: 


Ix] Hero-shrine of Orpheus 471 


of Telete, ‘Rite of Initiation’ Pausanias comments as follows: 
‘In my opinion Orpheus was a man who surpassed his pre- 
decessors in the beauty of his poems and attained to great power, 
because he was believed to have discovered rites of the gods and 
purifications for unholy deeds and remedies for diseases and means 
of averting divine wrath” And again, at the close of his account 
of the various miraculous legends that had gathered about Orpheus 
he says: ‘ Whoever has concerned himself with poetry knows that 
all the hymns of Orpheus are short and that the number of them 
all is not great. The Lycomids! know them and chant them over 
their rites. In beauty they may rank as second to the hymns of 
Homer, but they have attained to even higher divine favour.’ 

Pausanias puts the relation between Homer and Orpheus in 
much the same fashion as Aristophanes?, who makes Aeschylus 
recount the service of poets to the state: 

‘It was Orpheus revealed to us holy rites, our hands from bloodshed with- 
holding ; 

Musaeos gave us our healing arts, oracular words unfolding; 

And Hesiod showed us to till the earth and the seasons of fruits and ploughing; 

But Homer the god-like taught good things, and this too had for his glory 

That he sang of arms and battle array and deeds renowned in story.’ 

Homer sang of mortals, Orpheus of the gods; both are men, 
but of the two Orpheus is least fabulous. About both gather 
alien accretions, but the kernel remains human not divine. 

Orpheus then halted half way on the ladder between earth 
and heaven, a ladder up which many mortals have gone and 
vanished into the remote unreality of complete godhead. 

S. Augustine admirably hits the mark when he says’: ‘ After 
the same interval of time there came the poets, who also, since 
they wrote poems about the gods, are called theologians, Orpheus, 
Musaeus, Linus. But these theologians were not worshipped as 
gods, though in some fashion the kingdom of the godless is wont 
to set Orpheus as head over the rites of the underworld.’ 

The line indeed between hero and underworld god was, as has 
already been abundantly seen, but a shifting shadow. It is useless 
however to urge that because Orpheus had a local shrine and a 
cult he was therefore a god in the current acceptation of the 

1 The worship of Eros by the Lycomids will be discussed later (p. 644). 
2 Ar. Ran. 1032. 


3 §. August. de civit. dei xvimt. 14: Verum isti theologi non pro diis culti sunt 
quamvis Orpheum nescio quomodo inferiis sacris praeficere soleat civitas impiorum. 


472 Orpheus [ CH. 


term. Theseus had a shrine, so had Diomede, so had each and 
every canonical hero; locally they were potent for good and evil, 
but we do not call them gods. Athenaeus! marks the distinction. 
‘Apollo, he says, ‘the Greeks accounted the wisest and most 
musical of the gods, and Orpheus of the semi-gods.’ 

Once we are fairly awake to the fact that Orpheus was a real 
live man, not a faded god, we are struck by the human touches 
in his story, and most by a certain vividness of emotion, a reality 
and personality of like and dislike that attends him. He seems 
to have irritated and repelled some as much as he attracted 
others. Pausanias? tells how of old prizes were offered for hymns 
in honour of a god. Chrysothemis of Crete and Philammon and 
Thamyris come and compete like ordinary mortals, but Orpheus 
‘thought such great things of his rites and his own personal 
character that he would not compete at all’ Always about him 
there is this aloof air, this remoteness, not only of the self-sufficing 
artist, who is and must be always alone, but of the scrupulous 
moralist and reformer; yet withal and through all he is human, a 
man, who Socrates-like draws men and repels them, not by per- 
suading their reason, still less by enflaming their passions, but by 
sheer magic of his personality. It is this mesmeric charm that 
makes it hard even now-a-days to think soberly of Orpheus. 


ORPHEUS AT ATHENS. 


Orpheus, poet, seer, musician, theologist, was a man and a 
Thracian, and yet it is chiefly through his influence at Athens 
that we know him. The author of the Rhesos makes the Muse 
complain that it is Athene not Odysseus that is the cause of the 
tragedy that befell the Thracian prince. She thus appeals to the 
goddess? : 

‘And yet we Muses, we his kinsmen hold 

Thy land revered and there are wont to dwell, 

And Orpheus, he own cousin to the dead, 

Revealed to thee his secret mysteries.’ 
The tragedian reflects the double fact—the Thracian provenance, 
the naturalization in Athens. 


Orpheus, we know, reorganized and reformed the rites of 


1 Athen. xiv. 32 § 632. PULTE gal er 3 [Eur.] Rhes. 941. 


1x] Orpheus at Athens 473 


Bacchus. How much he was himself reorganized and reformed 
we shall never fully know. The work of editing and popularizing 
Orpheus at Athens was accredited to Onomacritos, he who made 
the indiscreet interpolation in the oracles of Musaeus and was 
banished for it by the son of Peisistratos'. If Onomacritos inter- 
polated oracles into the poems of Musaeus, why should he spare 
Orpheus? Tatian® writes that ‘Orpheus was contemporary with 
Herakles, another note that he is heroic rather than divine, and 
adds: ‘They say that the poems that were circulated under the 
name of Orpheus were put together by Onomacritos the Athenian,’ 
Clement* goes further. He says that these poems were actually 
by Onomacritos who lived in the 50th Olympiad in the reign of 
the Peisistratidae. The line in those days between writing poems 
of your own and editing those of other people was less sharply 
drawn than it is to-day. Onomacritos had every temptation to 
interpolate, for he himself wrote poems on the rites of Dionysos, 
Pausanias* in explaining the presence of the Titan Anytos at 
Lycosura says: ‘Onomacritos took the name of the Titans from 
Homer and composed orgies for Dionysos and made the Titans 
the actual agents in the sufferings of Dionysos,’ 

Something then was done about ‘ Orpheus’ in the time of the 
Peisistratidae as something was done about ‘ Homer, some work 
of editing, compiling, revising. What form precisely this work 

# took is uncertain. What is certain is that somehow Orphism, 
Orphic rites and Orphic poems had, before the classical period, 
come to Athens. The effect of this Orphic spirit was less obvious, 
less widespread, than that of Homer, but perhaps more intimate 
and vital. We know it because Euripides and Plato are deep- 
dyed in Orphism, we know it not only by the signs of actual 
influence, but by the frequently raised protest. 


Orpheus, it has been established in the mouth of many 
witnesses, modified, ordered, ‘rearranged’ Bacchic rites. We 
naturally ask—was this all? Did this man whose name has 
come down to us through the ages, in whose saintly and ascetic 


1 Herod. vir. 6. 

2 Tat. adv. Graec, xia. 271 ra bm’ abrod éemipepduevd pacw vbrd ’Ovopaxptrov rob 
>A@nvatou cuvTeTax Oar. 

3 Clem. Al. Str. 1. 332 ’Ovouaxpcros ot Ta els "Oppéa pepdueva Néyerar elvar KaTa 
Tiy Tov IlevotoTpaT Oey apxny mepl THY TevTHKOoTHY ’OhumTidda. 


2S Petyittt3eioe 


474 Orpheus [ CH. 


figure the early Church saw the prototype of her Christ, effect 
nothing more vital than modification? Was his sole mission to 
bring order and decorum into an orgiastic and riotous ritual ? 

Such a notion is @ priori as improbable as it is false to actual 
fact. Externally Orpheus differs from Dionysos, to put it plainly, 
in this. Dionysos is drunken, Orpheus is utterly sober. But this 
new spirit of gentle decorum is but the manifestation, the out- 
ward shining of a lambent flame within, the expression of a new 
spiritual faith which brought to man at the moment he most 
needed it, the longing for purity and peace in this life, the hope 
_ of final fruition in the next. 

Before proceeding to discuss in detail such records of actual 
Orphic rites as remain, this new principle must be made clear. 
Apart from it Orphic rites lose all their real sacramental signi- 
ficance and lapse into mere superstitions. 


THE CARDINAL DOCTRINE OF ORPHISM. 


The whole gist of the matter may thus be summed up. 
| Orpheus took an ancient superstition, deep-rooted in the savage 
ritual of Dionysos, and lent to it a new spiritual significance. 
The old superstition and the new faith are both embodied in the 
little Orphic text that stands at the head of this chapter: 


‘Many are the wand-bearers, few are the Bacchoi.’ 


Can we be sure that this is really an Orphic text or was it 
merely a current proverb of any and every religion and morality ? 
Plato’ says: ‘Those who instituted rites of initiation for us said 
of old in a parable that the man who came to Hades uninitiated 
lay in mud, but that those who had been purified and initiated 
and then came thither dwell with the gods. For those who are 
concerned with these rites say, They that bear the wand are 
many, the Bacchoi are few.’ Plato does not commit himself to 
any statement as to who ‘those who are concerned with these 
rites’ were, but Olympiodorus commenting on the passage says : 
‘He (Plato) everywhere misuses the sayings of Orpheus and 

1 Plato Phaed. p. 69 © elol yap 5h pacly of wept ras TerXeTds vapOnKkoPdpor pév 
moNol, Baxxor dé re matpo.. Olympiod. ad loc. rap wdet ravraxod ra Tov "Opdéws, 
610 Kal orlyov abrotd pyat- 


IloAXol pev vapOnxopdpo, matpo dé re Baxxo. 
vapOnkopbpous ob piv Baxxous rods modirixods Kah@v Baxxous dé rods Kadaprixous. 


1X | Cardinal Doctrine of Orphism 475 


therefore quotes this verse of his, “Many are the wand-bearers, 
few are the Bacchoi,” giving the name of wand-bearers and not 
Bacchoi to persons who engage in politics, but the name of 
Bacchoi to those who are purified.’ 

It has already been shown that the worshippers of Dionysos 
believed that they were possessed by the god. It was but a step 
further to pass to the conviction that they were actually identified 
with him, actually became him. This was a conviction shared 
by all orgiastic religions, and one doubtless that had its rise in 
the physical sensations of intoxication. Those who worshipped 
Sabazios became Saboi, those who worshipped Kubebe became 
Kubeboi, those who worshipped Bacchos Baccho1; in Egypt the 
worshippers of Osiris after. death became Osiris. The mere fact 
of intoxication would go far to promote such a faith, but there 
is little doubt that it was fostered, if not originated, by the 
pantomimic character of ancient ritual. It has been seen 
(p. 415) that in the Thracian rites ‘bull-voiced mimes’ took 
part, Lycophron (p. 435) tells that the women who worshipped 
the bull-Dionysos wore horns. It is a natural primitive instinct 
of worship to try by all manner of disguise to identify yourself 
more and more with the god who thrilled you. 

Direct evidence of this pantomimic element in the worship 
of Dionysos is not wanting, though unhappily it is of late 
date. In the course of the excavations on the west slope of 
the Acropolis, Dr Dorpfeld laid bare a building known to be 
an ‘ Iobaccheion,’ superimposed on an ancient triangular precinct 
of Dionysos, that of Dionysos in the Limnae. On this site was 
discovered an inscription’ giving in great detail the rules of a 
thiasos of Jobacchoi in the time of Hadrian. Among a mass of 
regulations about elections, subscriptions, feast-days, funerals of 
members and the like, come enactments about a sacred panto- 
mime in which the Jobacchoi took part. The divine persons 

1 Published by Dr Sam. Wide, A. Mitt. xrx. (1894), p. 248; discussed by 
Dr Ernst Maass, Orpheus (1895); see Dr Erwin Rohde, Kleine Schriften, p. 298. 

Line 63 ovdevi 6é é&éorar ev THe oTiBade ore aicat | ore HopuBioa oi're KpoThoat 
pera 6€ | rdons evKooulas Kai hovxlas Tovs pepic|uovs héyew Kal oveiy tporTaccorTos | 
Tou iepéws 7) TOU apxtGaKxou. 

Line 135 evxoomos 6€ kAnpotcbw 7 Kabic|\rdcOw id Tod iepéws Emipépwv Tat 
dkoo|uodvTe 7 PopuBodyre Tov BUpoor Tod Belod wu Sé dv maparebhe 6 GUpaos émuxpell\vayTos 
Tov iepéws 7 TOU apxiBaxxou | eLepxéoOw Tod EoTLaTopelov. éav dé alreOje aipérwoay 


avrov €&w Tod rvAG\vos of KatacTabnobuevor Ud Ty | lepéwy immo, Kal €oTw UrevOuvos | 
Tots Tepl TOY “aXouévwv mpooTel|uols. 


—— lc Xs 


476 Orpheus [CH. 


to be represented were Dionysos, Kore, Palaemon, Aphrodite, 
Proteurhythmos, and the parts were distributed by lot. 

The name Proteurhythmos, it will later (p. 656) be shown, 
marks the thiasos as Orphic, and thoroughly Orphic rather than 
Dionysiac are the regulations as to the peace and order to be 
observed. ‘Within the place of sacrifice no one is to make a 
noise, or clap his hands, or sing, but each man is to say his part 
and do it in all quietness and order as the priest and the Archi- 
bacchos direct.’ More significant still and more beautiful is the 
rule, that if any member is riotous an official appointed by the 
priest shall set against him who is disorderly or violent the 
thyrsos of the god. The member against whom the thyrsos is 
set up, must if the priest or the Archibacchos so decide leave 
the banquet hall. If he refuse, the ‘Horses’ appointed by the 
priest shall take him and set him outside the gates. The thyrsos 
of the god has become in truly Orphic fashion the sign not of 
revel and license, but of a worship fair and orderly. 

We have noted the quiet and order of the representation 
because it is so characteristically Orphic, but the main point is 
that in the worship of Dionysos we have this element of direct 
impersonation which helped on the conviction that man could 
identify himself with his god. The term Bacchae is familiar, so 
familiar that we are apt to forget its full significance. But in the 
play of Euripides there are not only Bacchae, god-possessed women 
worshippers, but also a Bacchos, and about his significance there 
can be no mistake. He is the god himself incarnate as one of his 
own worshippers. The doctrines of possession and incarnation are 
complementary, god can become man, man can become god, but 
the Bacchic religion lays emphasis rather on the one aspect that 
man can become god. The Epiphany of the Bacchos, it may be 
noted, is after a fashion characteristically Orphic; the beautiful 
stranger is intensely quiet, and this magical quiet exasperates 
Pentheus just as Orpheus exasperated the Maenads. The real 
old Bromios breaks out in the Epiphany of fire and thunder, in the 
bull-god and the madness of the end. 

The savage doctrine of divine possession, induced by intoxica- 
tion and in part by mimetic ritual, was it would seem almost 
bound to develope a higher, more spiritual meaning. We have 
already seen (p. 453) that the madness of Dionysos included the 


- ~~ 
Bix]. Immortality through Divinity 477 


madness of the Muses and Aphrodite, but, to make any real 
spiritual advance, there was needed it would seem a man of 
spiritual insight and saintly temperament, there was needed an 
Orpheus. The great step that Orpheus took was that, while he ~ 
kept the old Bacchic faith that man might become a god, he 
altered the conception of what a god was, and he sought to obtain 
that godhead by wholly different means. The grace he sought 
was not physical intoxication but spiritual ecstasy, the means he | 
adopted not drunkenness but abstinence and rites of purification. 

All this is by anticipation, to clear the ground; it will be 
abundantly proved when Orphic rites and documents known to 
be Orphic are examined. Before passing to these it may be well 
to emphasize one point—the salient contrast that this new re- 
ligious principle, this belief in the possibility of attaining divine 
life, presented to the orthodox Greek faith. 


The old orthodox anthropomorphic religion of Greece made the 
gods in man’s image, but, having made them, kept them aloof, 
distinct. It never stated in doctrine, it never implied in ritual, 
that man could become god. Nay more, against any such aspira, 
tion it raised again and again a passionate protest. To seek toe 
become even like the gods was to the Greek the sin most certain / 
to call down divine vengeance, it was ‘ Insolence.’ / 

Pindar is full of the splendour and sweetness of earthly life/ 
but full also of its insuperable limitation. He is instant in warning 
against the folly and insolence of any attempt to outpass it. To 
one he says, ‘Strive not thou to become a god’; to another?, 
‘The things of mortals best befit mortality.’ It is this limitation, 
this constant protest against any real aspiration, that makes 
Pindar, for all his pious orthodoxy, profoundly barren of any vital 
religious impulse. Orphic though he was in certain tenets as to 
a future life, his innate temperamental materialism prevents his 
ever touching the secret of Orphism ‘werde was du bist,’ and he 
transforms the new faith into an other-worldliness. He is com- 
pounded of ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing too much.’ ‘In all 
things, he says, ‘take measure by thyself®’ ‘It behoveth to 
seek from the gods things meet for mortals, knowing the things 


i Pind. Ol va 245 2 Isth. tv. 14. 3 Pyth. 1. 34. 


Sar 


478 Orpheus [CH. IX 


that are at our feet and to what lot we are born. Desire not, 
thou soul of mine, life of the immortals, but drink thy fill of what 
thou hast and what thou canst!’ In the name of religion it is 
all a desperate unfaith. We weary of this reiterated worldliness. 
It is not that he beats his wings against the bars; he loves too 
well his gilded cage. The gods are to him only a magnificent 
background to man’s life. But sometimes, just because he is 
supremely a poet, he is ware of a sudden sheen of glory, an almost 
theatrical stage effect lighting the puppet show. It catches his 
breath and ours. But straightway we are back to the old stock 
warnings against Tantalos, against Bellerophon, whose ‘heart is 
aflutter for things far off*.’ Only one thing he remembers, perhaps 
again because he was a poet, that winged Pegasos ‘dwelt for ever 
in the stables of the gods*.’ 


The cardinal doctrine of Orphic religion was then the possibility 
of attaining divine life. It has been said by some that the great 
contribution of Dionysos to the religion of Greece was the hope of 
~ immortality it brought. Unquestionably the Orphics believed in 
a future life, but this belief was rather a corollary than of the 
essence of their faith. Immortality, immutability, is an attribute 
of the gods. As Sophocles says*: 


‘Only to gods in heaven 
Comes no old age nor death of anything, 
All else is turmoiled by our master Time.’ 

To become a god was therefore incidentally as it were to 
attain immortality. But one of the beautiful things in Orphic 
religion was that the end completely overshadowed the means. + 
Their great concern was to become divine now. That could only 
be attained by perfect purity. They did not so much seek purity 
that they might become divinely immortal, they needed im- 
mortality that they might become divinely pure. The choral 
songs of the Bacchae are charged with the passionate longing 
after purity, in the whole play there is not one word, not one 
hint, of the hope of immortality. Consecration (oavoTns), perfect 
_ purity issuing in divinity, is, if will be seen, the keynote of Orphic 
faith, the goal of Orphie ritual. 


1 Pind. Pyth. m1. 59. 2 Isth. vr. 36. 5 Ol. xm. 92. 
4 Soph. Oed. Col. 607, trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. 
aq 


CHAPTER X. 
ORPHIC MYSTERIES. 


‘APNON YPH NHOIO OyasAEOC ENTOC IONTA 
EMMENAI* ACNEIH A ECTI PONEIN OCIA.’ 


a. THE OMOPHAGIA. 


THE most important literary document extant on Orphic cere- 
monial is a fragment of the Cretans of Euripides, preserved for us 
by Porphyry in his treatise on ‘Abstinence from Animal Food’— 
a passage Porphyry says he had ‘almost forgotten to mention.’ 

From an allusion in Aristophanes’ to ‘Cretan monodies and 
unhallowed marriages’ it seems probable that the Cretans dealt 
with the hapless wedlock of Pasiphaé. The fragment, Porphyry tells 
us, was spoken by the chorus of Cretan mystics who have come to 
the palace of Minos. It is possible they may have come to purify 
it from the recent pollution’. 

The mystics by the mouth of their leader make full and 
definite confession of the faith, or rather acknowledgement of 
the ritual acts, by which a man became a ‘ Bacchos,’ and they add 
a statement of the nature of the life he was thereafter bound to 
lead. Though our source is a poetical one, we learn from it, 
perhaps to our surprise, that to become a ‘Bacchos’ it was 
necessary to do a good deal more than dance enthusiastically 
upon the mountains. The confession runs as follows’: 


1 Ar. Ran. 849; see Nauck ad loc. 

2 The restoration attempted by Dr Kérte (Die Kreter des Euripides, Aufsiatze 
Ernst Curtius gewidmet, p. 197), on evidence drawn from Etruscan urns, seems 
to me quite uncertain. 

° Hur. frg. 475 ap. Porph. De Abst. 1v. 19, trans. Mr Gilbert Murray. 


ad 


480 - Orphic Mysteries ror. | 


‘Lord of Europa’s Tyrian line, 
Zeus-born, who holdest at thy feet 
The hundred citadels of Crete, 

I seek to. thee from that dim shrine, 


Roofed by the Quick and Carven Beam, 
By Chalyb steel and wild bull’s blood 
In flawless joints of cypress wood 

Made steadfast. There in one pure stream 


My days have run, the servant I, 

Initiate, of Idaean Jove ; 

Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove ; 
I have endured his thunder-cry!; 


Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts ; 
Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame ; 
I am Set Free and named by name 

A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests. 


Robed in pure white I have borne me clean 
From man’s vile birth and coffined clay, 
And exiled from my lips alway 

Touch of all meat where Life hath been.’ 


This confession must be examined in detail. 


The first avowal is: 

‘the servant I, 
Initiate, of Idaean Jove*’ 

It is remarkable that the mystic, though he becomes a 
‘Bacchos, avows himself as initiated to Idaean Zeus. But this 
Idaean Zeus is clearly the same as Zagreus, the mystery form of 
Dionysos. Zeus, the late comer (p. 319, n. 2), has taken over an 
earlier worship, the nature of which will become more evident 
after the ritual has been examined. 

Zeus has in a sense supplanted Zagreus, but only by taking on 
his nature. An analogous case has already been discussed in dealing 
with Zeus Meilichios (p. 19). At a time when the whole tendency 
of theology, of philosophy and of poetry was towards monotheism 
these fusions were easy and frequent. Of such a monotheistic 
divinity, half Zeus, half Hades, wholly Ploutos, we are told in 


1 Mr Murray translates the ms. reading : 
porns yevounv 
kal vuxrurdd\ov Zaypéws Bpovras 
Tas T wuopayous dairas TeNéoas. 
For Bpovras Dr Diels would read Bovras, i.e. Bouxddos. (See Dieterich, De Hymnis 
Orphicis, p. 11, and ef. Eur. frg. 203.) This emendation seems to me probable, 
but as both ms. readings and all suggested emendations are uncertain I have based 
no argument. on the word Bpovras. 
2 v.10 Ads Ldalou piorns yevdounv. 
+e 


— 


x] Zagreus 481 


another fragment of Euripides preserved by Clement of Alex- 
andria’. His ritual is that of the earth-gods. 


‘Ruler of all, to thee I bring libation 

And honey cake, by whatso appellation 

Thou wouldst be called, or Hades, thou, or Zeus, 
Fireless the sacrifice, all earth’s produce 

I offer. Take thou of its plenitude, 

For thou amongst the Heavenly Ones art God, 
Dost share Zeus’ sceptre, and art ruling found 
With Hades o’er the kingdoms underground.’ 

It has been conjectured that this fragment also is from the 
Cretans, but we have no certain evidence. Clement says in quoting 
the passage that ‘Euripides, the philosopher of the stage, has 
divined as in a riddle that the Father and the Son are one God.’ 
Another philosopher before Euripides had divined the same truth, 
and he was Orpheus, only he gave to his Father and Son the 
name of Bacchos, and, all important for our purpose, gave to the 
Son in particular the title of Zagreus. 

In discussing the titles of Dionysos (p. 414), it has been seen 
that the names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, were given to the god 
to mark him as a spirit of intoxication, of enthusiasm. ‘The title 
Zagreus has been so far left unconsidered because it is especially 
an Orphic name. Zagreus is the god of the mysteries, and his full 
content can only be understood in relation to Orphic rites. 

Zagreus is the mystery child guarded by the Kouretes, torn in 
pieces by the Titans. Our first mention of him is a line preserved 
to us from the lost epic the Alemaeonis?, which ran as follows : 


‘Holy Earth and Zagreus greatest of all gods.’ 


The name of Zagreus never occurs in Homer, and we are apt to 
think that epic writers were wholly untouched by mysticism. Had 
the Alcmaeonis not been lost, we might have had occasion to 
modify this view. It was an epic story the subject-matter 
of which was necessarily a great sin and its purification, and 
though primarily the legend of Alemaeon was based, as has been 
seen, on a curiously physical conception of pollution (p. 220), it 
may easily have taken on Orphic developments. Zagreus appears 
little in literature ; he is essentially a ritual figure, the centre of a 


1 Kur. frg. 904 ap. Clem. Al. Strom. v. p. 688. 
* Ap. Etym. Gud. p. 227. The lexicographers explain the title as meaning 
mighty hunter, but in the ritual Zagreus is more hunted than hunter. 


H. 31 


482 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. : 


cult so primitive, so savage that a civilized literature instinctively 
passed him by, or at most figured him as a shadowy Hades, 

But religion knew better. She knew that though Dionysos 
as Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, as_god of intoxication, was much, 
Dionysos as Zagreus, as Nyktelios, as Isodaites’, he of the night, 
he who is ‘a meal shared by all’ was more. The Orphics faced 
the most barbarous elements of their own faith and turned them 
not only qua theology into a vague monotheism, but qua ritual 
into a high sacrament of spiritual purification. This ntual, the 
main feature of which was ‘the red and bleeding feast, must now 
be examined. 


The avowal of the first certain ritual act performed comes in 
the line where the mystic says 


T have..c.:: 
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts?.’ 

The victim in Crete was a bull. 

The shrine of Idaean Zeus, from which the mystics came, was 
cemented with bulls’ blood*. Possibly this may mean that at its 
foundation a sacred bull was slain and his blood mixed with the 
mortar; anyhow it indicates connection with bull-worship. The 
characteristic mythical monster of Crete was the bull-headed 
Minotaur. Behind the legend of Pasiphaé, made monstrous by 
the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors, it can scarcely be 
doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony of ritual 
wedlock (‘epos ydmuos) with a primitive bull-headed divinity. He 
need not have been imported from Thrace; zoomorphic nature- 
gods spring up everywhere. The bull-Dionysos of Thrace when 
he came to Crete found a monstrous god, own cousin to himself. 

Such a monstrous god is depicted on the curious seal-impression 
found by Mr Arthur Evans* at Cnossos and reproduced in fig. 146. 
He is seated on a throne of camp-stool shape, and before him 
stands a human figure, probably a worshipper. That the monster 
is a god seems clear from the fact that he is seated; that he is a 


1 Plut. de Hi 1x. Acdvucov 6é kal Zaypéa cai Nuxrédov xal “Ioodalrny ad’rov 
évoudgover.. Taking the three ritual titles in conjunction it seems almost certain 
that ’Icodairns refers to the duddayoa datres of the Zagreus ritual shared alike by 
all mystics. 

2 v. 11 rds 7 Guoddyous Satras redécas. 

8 Kur. frg. 476 Kal ravpodérw xd\An Kpabeto’. 

4A. Evans, Annual of British School at Athens, vol. vir. p. 18, fig. 7a. 


‘ 
4 





x| ~The Omophagia 483 


bull-god is not so certain. The head is not drawn with sufficient 
exactness for us to be sure what beast is 
intended. He has certainly no horns, but 
the hoof and tail might be those of a 
bull. The seal-impressions found by Mr 
Hogarth! in such large numbers at Zakro 
show how widespread in Crete were these 
fantastic forms. The line between man 
and beast is a faint one. Mr Hogarth 
holds that the majority of these sealings 
have nothing to do with cults—they are 
the product, he thinks, of an art which 
has ‘passed from monsters with a mean- 
ing to monsters of pure fancy. He ex- 

cepts however certain sealings where a Wij GZ. 
Minotaur is represented?, a monster with (“% png ¢ 
horned bull-head, pronounced bovine ears ay 
and tail, but apparently human trunk, 
arms and legs. Like the monster in fig. 
146, this Minotaur is seated, but with his left leg crossed human- 
fashion over his right knee and with human hands extended. 

The traditional Minotaur took year by year his tale of human 
victims. Of the ritual of the bull-god in Crete, we know that it 
consisted in part of the tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is 
the dreadful suspicion of human sacrifice. 






Se} 






Fic. 146. 


Part of the avowal of the Cretan mystic is that he has accom- 
plished the @podayia, the rite of ‘the feast of raw flesh. That a 
feast of raw flesh of some sort was traditionally held to be a part 
of Bacchic ceremonial, is clear from the words Euripides? put 
into the mouth of his Maenads: 


‘The joy of the red quick fountains, 
The blood of the hill-goat torn,’ 


where the expression in the original, @yoddyov yadpw ‘joy in 
eating raw flesh, admits of no doubt. 
An integral part of this terrible ritual was the tearing asunder 
of the slain beast, in order, no doubt, to get the flesh as raw as 
1 D. Hogarth, J.H.S. vol. xxm. 1902, p. 76 and plates vi—rx. 
2 Op. cit. nos. 17—18, and Ann. B.S.A. vu. fig. 45. 3 See supr, p. 452. 
pee, 


——— 2 _— q 
484 Orphic Mysteries [ cH. 


might be, for the blood is the life. Plutarch}, in his horrified 
protest against certain orgiastic rites, joins the two ritual acts 
together, the ‘eatings of raw flesh’ and the ‘rendings asunder.’ 
‘There are certain festivals, he says, ‘and sacrificial ceremonies as 
well as unlucky and gloomy days, in which take place eatings of 
raw flesh and rendings asunder, and fastings and beatings of the 
breast, and again disgraceful utterances in relation to holy things, 
and mad ravings and yells upraised with a loud din and tossing of 
the neck to and fro. These ceremonies, he goes on to explain, are, to 
his thinking, not performed in honour of any god, but ‘they are pro- 
pitiations and appeasements performed with a view to the riddance 
of mischievous demons; such also, he says, were the human sacrifices 
performed of old’ Plutarch’s words read like a commentary on the 
Orphic ritual under discussion: we have the fasting, we have the 
horrid feast; he sees the savage element of ‘riddance, but he 
misses the saving grace of enthusiasm and mystic significance. 
If the sympathetic religious-minded Plutarch was horrified at 
a ritual so barbarous, it filled the Christian Fathers with unholy 
joy. Here was an indefeasible argument against paganism, and 
for once they compel our reluctant sympathy. ‘I will not,’ cries — 
Clement”, ‘dance out your mysteries, as they say Alcibiades did, but 
I will strip them naked, and bring them out on to the open stage 
of life, in view of those who are the spectators at the drama of 
truth. The Bacchoi hold orgies in honour of a mad Dionysos, they 
celebrate a divine madness by the Eating of Raw Flesh, the final 
accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the flesh of 
butchered victims, they are crowned with snakes, and shriek out the 
name of Eva, that Eve through whom sin came into the world, and 
the symbol of their Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent.’ And 
again®: ‘the mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman; for while 
he was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing their armed 


1 Plut. de defect. orac. xiv. 

2 Clem. Al. Protr. m1. 12 Acédvucoy pawéddnv dpyidfouc. Baxxot wuodayla riav 
iepounviav (? lepowaviav) d-yovres Kal TeNéoKovct Tas Kpeavoulas Tav Povey dverTEeuméevor 
Tots bpecw, Ero\oNU(ovres Hvay xrX.; and again speaking of the analogous ceremonies 
of the Korybants Clement (Protr. 11. 6) says: kal ratr’ ore Ta mvorihpia, cuveNdvTe 
pdvar, pbvoe kal rao. 

3 Clem. Al. Protr. 1. 17 ra yap Avovicov pvorhpia rédeov amavOpwra, bv eloére 
matda ovra évorrdw KWhoe meptxopevdyvTwy Kovpjrwyv dd\wm dé dbrodtvrav Tirduwv 
amaTncavTes madapimbdecw abipuacw ovro 5) ol Tiradves diéoracav ére vyriaxov 
ovTa ws 6 Tis TEAETHS TonTHs "Oppeds Pnow 6 Opaxos: and Protr. x1. 119 referring to 
the Bacchae he speaks of the Maenads as al dvcayvov xpeavoulay wudmevac. 


eee ee 


x] The Omophagia 485 


dance about him, the Titans stole upon him, deceived him with 
childish toys and tore him to pieces.’ 

Arnobius? pretends that the Bacchanalia are so horrible he must 
pass them by, and then goes on to revel in revolting detail over the 
rites ‘which the Greeks call Feasts of Raw Flesh (@uodayiav) in 
which with feigned frenzy and loss of a sane mind you twine snakes 
about you, and, to show yourselves full of the divinity and majesty 
of the god, you demolish with gory mouths the entrails of goats 
bleating for mercy.” The gentle vegetarian Porphyry? knows that 
in Chios, according to tradition, there had been a Dionysos called 
Omadius, the Raw One, and that the sacrifice he used to exact was 
the tearmg of a man to pieces. Istros* stated that of old the 
Kouretes sacrificed children to Kronos. On Kronos all human 
sacrifice was apt to be fathered, but the mention of the Kouretes, 
coupled with the confession of the Cretan mystic, shows that the 
real divinity 1s Zagreus. 


To these vague though consistent traditions of the eating and 
tearing of raw flesh, whether of man or goat or calf, in honour 
of some form of Dionysos, evidence more precise and definitely 
descriptive of Cretan ritual has been left us, again by a Christian 
Father, Firmicus Maternus* The festival he describes was, like 
many others in honour of Dionysos, trieteric, 1.e. celebrated each 
alternate year. 

Firmicus in the fashion of his day gives first a long and 
purely aetiological narrative of the death of the son of a king 
of Crete, to appease whose wrath the ceremony, it was believed, 
was instituted. ‘The Cretans commemorated the death of the boy 
by certain ceremonies, doing all things in regular order which the 


1 Arnob, v. 19 atque vos plenos Dei numine ac majestate docentes caprorum 
reclamantium viscera cruentatis oribus dissipatis: the words in italics shew that 
Arnobius understood the real gist of the rite. 

* Porphyr. De Abst. u. 55 €@vov 6€ kai év Xiy TO ’Quadiy Acoviow dévOpwrov 
Ovacma@vres kal ev Tevédw ws pnow HvedXmis 6 Kapiorvos. 

3 Ap. Porphyr. De Abst. 11.56. Clement (Protr. ur. 4) says, citing as his authority 
the Nostoi of Antikleides, that this human sacrifice was offered by the Lyctii, a 
Cretan tribe. 

4 Firmicus Maternus de err. profan. relig. c. 6 Cretenses, ut furentis tyranni 
sacvitiam mitigarent, festos funeris dies statuunt et annuum sacrum trieterica 
consecratione componunt, omnia per ordinem facientes, quae puer moriens aut 
fecit aut passus est. Vivum laniant dentibus taurum, crudeles epulas annuis 
commemorationibus excitantes et per secreta silvarum clamoribus dissonis ejulantes 
fingunt animi furentis insaniam ut illud facinus non per fraudem factum sed per 
insaniam crederetur. 


486 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


boy did or suffered.’ These ceremonies included an enactment of 
the scene of the child playing with the toys and surprised by the 
Titans, and perhaps originally the slaying and tearing to pieces of 
a real child, but in the festival as described by Firmicus a bull 
was surrogate. ‘They tear in pieces a live bull with their teeth and 
by howling with discordant shouts through the secret places of the 
woods they simulate the madness of an enraged mind.’ 

Firmicus, by his obviously somewhat inaccurate statement, has 
gone far to discredit his own testimony. After the performance of 
a religious ceremony that involved the tearing of a live bull’s flesh 
by human teeth’ the surviving worshippers would be few. But, 
because of this exaggeration, we need not discredit the whole 
ritual of the bull-slaying, nor the tearing and eating of raw, 
though not actually living, flesh, The bull indeed comes in so 
awkwardly in the midst of the aetiological story of the child, that 
we may be practically sure this account of a bygone ritual is 
authentic. 


Some light is thrown on the method, and much on the meaning, 
of the horrible feast by an account left us by S. Nilus’, a hermit 
of Mt. Sinai in the 4th century, of the sacrifice of a camel among 
the Arabs of his time. 8. Nilus seems to have spent some of his 
abundant leisure in the careful examination of the rites and 
customs of the heathen around, and it is much to be regretted 
that in his ‘Narrations’ he has not recorded more of his obser- 
vations. The nomadic condition of the Arabs about Sinai im- 
pressed him much; he notes that they are without trade, arts or 
agriculture, and if other food failed them, fed on their camels and 
only cooked the flesh just enough to enable them to tear it with 
their teeth. They worshipped no god, either in spirit or through 
an image made by hands, but sacrificed to the morning star at its 
rising. They by preference sacrificed boys in the flower of their 
age and of special beauty, and slew them at dawn on a rude heap 


1 Tf any one finds the tearing of the bull with the teeth a hard saying, he may 
be reassured by the statement of Nonnus (Dionys. vr. 205) that the bull-shaped 
Dionysos was cut in little bits by a knife, which would greatly facilitate matters ; 

duoBaln dé povies 
Ttavpopun Ardvucov éutot’iddovTo waxalpy. 

2 Nili opera, Narrat. 11. 28, Migne, Patrol. uxxtx. I owe this reference to Nilus 
to Prof. Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites p. 320, but as the passage 
is of cardinal importance in relation to the account of Firmicus I have substituted 
a translation for his summary. 


a 


x] The Omophagia 487 


of piled-up stones. He pathetically observes that this practice of 
theirs caused him much anxiety; he was nervous lest they should 
take a fancy to a beautiful young boy convert he had with him 
and sacrifice ‘his pure and lovely body to unclean demons.’ But, 
he goes on, ‘when the supply of boys was lacking, they took 
a camel of white colour and otherwise faultless, bent it down 
upon its knees, and went circling round it three times in a 
circuitous fashion. The leader of the song and of the procession 
to the star was either one" of their chiefs or a priest of special 
honour. He, after the third circuit had been made, and before 
the worshippers had finished the song, while the last words were 
still on their lips, draws his sword and smites the neck of the 
camel and eagerly tastes of the blood. The rest of them in like 
fashion run up and with their knives some cut off a small bit of 
the hide with its hairs upon it, others hack at any chance bit 
of flesh they can get. Others go on to the entrails and inwards 
and leave no scrap of the victim uneaten that might be seen by 
the sun at its rising. They do not refrain even from the bones 
and marrow, but overcome by patience and perseverance the 
toughness of the resistance.’ 

The account of Nilus leaves no doubt as to the gist of the 
ceremony :(the worshippers aim at devouring the victim before 
the life has left the still warm blood.) Raw flesh, Prof. Robertson 
Smith points out, is called in Hebrew and Syriac ‘living’ flesh. 
Thus, in the most literal way, all those who shared in the ceremony 
absorbed into themselves part of the victim’s life. 

For live bull then we substitute raw bull, and the statement 
of Firmicus presents no difficulties. Savage economy demands 
that your juju, whatever it may be, should be as fresh as possible. 
Probably, at first, the bull may have been eaten just for the sake of 
absorbing its strength, without any notion of a divine sacrament. 

The idea that by eatmmg an animal you absorb its qualities is 
too obvious a piece of savage logic to need detailed illustration. — 
That the uneducated and even the priestly Greek had not advanced 
beyond this stage of sympathetic magic is shown by a remark of 
Porphyry’s'. He wants to prove that the soul is held to be 
affected or attracted even by corporeal substances of kindred 
nature, and of this belief he says we have abundant experience. 

1 Porphyr. De Abst. u. 48. 


488 Orphic Mysteries ii [ CH. | 


‘At least,’ he says, ‘those who wish to take unto themselves the 
spirits of prophetic animals, swallow the most effective parts of 
them, such as the hearts of crows and moles and hawks, for so they 
possess themselves of a spirit present with them and prophesying 
like a god, one that enters into them themselves at the time of 
its entrance into the body.’ If a mole’s heart can make you see 
into dark things, great virtue may be expected from a piece of 
raw bull. It is not hard to see how this savage theory of com- 
munion would pass’ into a higher sacramentalism, into the faith 
that by partaking of an animal who was a divine vehicle’ you 
could enter spiritually into the divine life that bad physically 
entered you, and so be made one with the god. It was the 
mission of Orphism to effect these mystical transitions. 


Because a goat was torn to pieces by Bacchants in Thrace, 
because a bull was, at some unknown date, eaten raw in Crete, 
we need not conclude that either of these practices regularly 
obtained in civilized Athens. The initiated bull-eater was cer- 
tainly known of there, and the notion must have been fairly 
familiar, or it would not have pointed a joke for Aristophanes. 
In the audacious prorrhesis of the Frogs? the uninitiated are 
bidden to withdraw, and among them those 

‘Who never were trained by bull-eating Kratinos 

In mystical orgies poetic and vinous.’ 

The worship of Dionysos of the Raw Flesh must have fallen into 
abeyance in Periclean Athens; but though civilized man, as a rule, 
shrinks from raw meat, yet, given imminent peril to rouse the 
savage in man, even in civilized man the faith in Dionysos 
Omestes burns up afresh. Hence stories of human sacrifice on 
occasions of great danger rise up and are accepted as credible. 
Plutarch*, narrating what happened before the battle of Salamis, 


1 One of the titles of Dionysos, i.e. Hiraphiotes, is as Mr R. A. Neil has pointed 
out the etymological equivalent of the Sanscrit varsabha, bull: see Golden Bough, 
2nd edit. vol. um. p. 164. 

4 2 Ar. Ran. 355 unde Kparivov rod ravpopdyou yAwrrns Baxxet’ ére\éoOn, trans. 
ogers. 

5 Plut. Vit. Them. xm. In this same way a legend grew up and was accredited 
by Neanthes, the Cyzicene historian, that when Epimenides was ‘ purifying Attica 
by human blood’ a youth, Kratinos, offered himself as a willing sacrifice. But 
how apocryphal such stories may be is owned by Athenaeus himself (x11. 78 § 602), 
who adds after his narrative that he is aware that the whole story was said by 
Polemon to have been a fiction. 


_ 





x] aid The Omophagia 489 


writes as follows: ‘As Themistocles was performing the sacrifice 
for omens (ogayiafouévw) alongside of the admiral’s trireme, there 
were brought to him three captives of remarkable beauty, attired 
in splendid raiment and gold ornaments; they were reputed to be 
the sons of Artayktes and Sandauke sister to Xerxes. When 
Euphrantides the soothsayer caught sight of them, and observed that 
at the same moment a bright flame blazed out from the burning 
victims, and at the same time a sneeze from the right gave a sign, 
he took Themistocles by the hand and bade consecrate and sacrifice 
all the youths to Dionysos Omestes, and so make his prayer, 
for thus both safety and victory would ensue to the Greeks. 
Themistocles was thunderstruck at the greatness and strangeness 
of the omen, it being such a thing as was wont to occur at great 
crises and difficult issues, but the people, who Jook for salvation 
rather by irrational than rational means, invoked the god with a 
loud shout together, and bringing up the prisoners to the altar 
imperatively demanded that the sacrifice should be accomplished 
as the seer had prescribed. These things are related by Phanias 
the Lesbian, a philosopher not unversed in historical matters.’ 
Phanias lived in the 4th century B.c. Plutarch evidently thought 
him a respectable authority, but the fragments of his writings that 
we possess are all of the anecdotal type, and those which relate to 
Themistocles are evidently from a hostile source. His statement, 
therefore, cannot be taken to prove more than that a very recent 
human sacrifice was among the horrors conceivably possible to a 
Greek of the 4th century B.c., especially if the victim were a 
‘barbarian.’ 

The suspicion is inevitable that behind the primitive Cretan 
rites of bull-tearing and bull-eating there lay an orgy still more 
hideous, the sacrifice of a human child. A vase-painting in the 
British Museum’, too revolting for needless reproduction here, 
represents a Thracian tearing with his teeth a slain child, while 
the god Dionysos, or rather perhaps we should say Zagreus, 
stands by approving. The vase is not adequate evidence that 
human children were slain and eaten, but it shows that the vase- 
painter of the 5th century B.c. believed such a practice was appro- 
priate to the worship of a Thracian god. 





1 Published and discussed in relation to the myth of Zagreus by Mr Cecil Smith, 
J.H.S., 1890, p. 343. 


490 Orphic Mysteries [ cH. 


A very curious account of a sacrifice to Dionysos in Tenedos 
helps us to realize how the shift from human to animal sacrifice, 
from child to bull or calf, may have come about. Aelian’ in his 
book on the Nature of Animals makes the following statement : 
‘The people of Tenedos in ancient days used to keep a cow with 
calf, the best they had, for Dionysos, and when she calved, why, 
they tended her like a woman in child-birth. But they sacrificed 
the new born calf, having put cothurni on its feet. Yes, and the 
man who struck it with the axe is pelted with stones in the holy rite 
and escapes to the sea. The conclusion can scarcely be avoided 
that here we have a ritual remembrance of the time when a child 
was really sacrificed. A calf is substituted but 1t 1s humanized 
as far as possible, and the sacrificer, though he is bound to sacri- 
fice, is guilty of an outrage®. Anyhow, that the calf was regarded 

_as a child is clear; the line between human and merely animal is 
to primitive man a shifting shadow. 

The mystic in his ritual confession clearly connects his feast of 
raw flesh with his service of Zagreus : 


‘Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove; 
I have endured his thunder-cry ; 


Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.’ 


It remains to consider more closely the import of the sacred 
legend of Zagreus. 


That the legend as well as the rite was Cretan and was con- 
nected with Orpheus is expressly stated by Diodorus*. In his 
account of the various forms taken by the god Dionysos, he says 
‘they allege that the god (i.e. Zagreus) was born of Zeus and 
Persephone in Crete, and Orpheus in the mysteries represents him 
as torn in pieces by the Titans.’ 

When a people has outgrown in culture the stage of its own 
primitive rites, when they are ashamed or at least a little anxious 
and self-conscious about domg what yet they dare not leave undone, 
they instinctively resort to mythology, to what is their theology, 
and say the men of old time did it, or the gods suffered it. There 
is nothing like divine or very remote human precedent. Hence the 

1 Ael. N.A, xin, 34 NOs Bddrera 7H dolg. dola is the regular word for a 


mystic rite, cf. Hom. Hymn. ad Cer. 211 dolns éréBn. 
2 See supra, p. 113. 3 Diod. Sic. v. 75. 4. 





x] Myth of Zagreus 491 


complex myth of Zagreus. When precisely this myth was first 
formulated it is impossible to say; it comes to us in complete form 
only through late authors’. It was probably shaped and re-shaped 
to suit the spiritual needs of successive generations. The story as 
told by Clement and others is briefly this: the infant god variously 
called Dionysos and Zagreus was protected by the Kouretes or 
Korybantes who danced around him their armed dance. The 
Titans desiring to destroy him lured away the child by offering 
him toys, a cone, a rhombos, and the golden apples of the Hes- 
perides, a mirror, a knuckle bone, a tuft of wool. The toys are 
variously enumerated*. Having lured him away they set on him, 
slew him-and tore him limb from limb. Some authorities add that 
they cooked his limbs and ate them. Zeus hurled his thunderbolts 
upon them and sent them down to Tartaros. According to some 
authorities, Athene saved the child’s heart, hiding it in a cista. 
A mock figure of gypsum was set up, the rescued heart placed in 
it and the child brought thereby to life again. The story was 
completed under the influence of Delphi by the further statement 
that the limbs of the dismembered god were collected and buried 
at Delphi in the sanctuary of Apollo. 

The monstrous complex myth is obviously aetiological through 
and through, the kernel of the whole being the ritual fact that a 
sacrificial bull, or possibly a child, was torn to pieces and his flesh 
eaten. Who tore him to pieces? In actual fact his worshippers, 
but the myth-making mind always clamours for divine precedent. 
If there was any consistency in the mind of the primitive mytho- 
logist we should expect the answer to be ‘holy men or gods, as an 
example. Not at all. In a sense the worshipper believes the 
sacrificial bull to be divine, but, brought face to face with the 


1 The scattered sources for the Zagreus myth are given in full in Abel’s Orphica 
(p. 230 ff.). They appear to be ail based on a lost poem or poems attributed 
to Orpheus of which Clement in the passage already discussed (p. 484) quotes two 
lines: as 6 THs TeXeTHs rornTys Opde’s dyow 6 Opaxcos: 

K@vos Kai powBos kal malyvia Kapmeciyua 

para Te xptcea Kada trap’ ‘Eorepidwy \ryudavow, 
and the scholiast on the passage observes (Dind. 1. p. 433) @ua yap Fobiov Kpéa 
oi pvdmevor Acovicw, detyua TotTo TeNovmevot TOD oTapayyuod by iméotn Atédvucos bd 
Tiravev. 

2 Among these sacred objects which cannot be discussed in detail here perhaps 
the most interesting was the rhombos or bull-roarer still in use among savage 
tribes, on the significance of which fresh light has recently been thrown by 
Dr Frazer in his paper ‘On some ceremonies of the Central Australian Tribes.’ 
Melbourne 1900. ; 


492 Orphic Mysteries [ OH. ) 


notion of the dismemberment of a god, he recoils. It was primitive 
bad men who did this horrible deed. Why does he imitate them ? 
This is the sort of question he never asks. It might interfere with 
the pious practice of ancestral custom, and custom is ever stronger 
than reason. So he goes on weaving his aetiological web. He 
eats the bull; so the bad Titans must have eaten the god. But, as 
they were bad, they must have been punished; on this point 
primitive theology is always inexorable. So they were slain 
by Zeus with his thunderbolts. 

Other ritual details had of course to be worked in. The 
Kouretes, the armed Cretan priests, had a local war or mystery 
dance: they were explained as the protectors of the sacred 
child. Sacred objects were carried about in cistae; they were 
of a magical sanctity, fertility-charms and the like. Some inge- 
nious person saw in them a new significance, and added thereby 
not a little to their prestige; they became the toys by which 
the Titans ensnared the sacred baby. It may naturally be asked 
why were the Titans fixed on as the aggressors? They were of 
course known to have fought against the Olympians in general, 
but in the story.of the child Dionysos they appear somewhat as 
bolts from the blue. Their name even, it would seem, is aetio- 
logical, and behind it lies a curious ritual practice. 


The Dionysiaca of Nonnus? is valuable as a source of ritual 
and constantly betrays Orphic influence. From it we learn in 
many passages? that it was the custom for the mystae to bedaub 
themselves with a sort of white clay or gypsum. This gypsum 
was so characteristic of mysteries that it is constantly qualified in 
Nonnus by the epithet ‘mystic.’ The technical terms for this 
ritual act of bedaubing with clay were ‘to besmear’ and ‘to | 
smear off’ (aepsudtrew and amoudtrew), and they are used as 


1 Nonnus may have based his poem on the Baccapixa of Dionysius, to which it 
seems possible that the fragments recently discovered of an epic poem dealing with 
Bacchic subjects belong. These fragments contain a curious account of the slaying 
and eating of a human victim disguised as a stag. See Mr Kenyon in Herwerden’s 
Album Gratulatorium and Dr Ludwich, ‘Das Papyros-Fragment eines Dionysos- 
Epos’ (Berl. Philolog. Wochenschrift, Jan. 3, 1903, p. 27). 

* 2 Nonn. Dionys. xxvu1. 228 
€XNeukaivovto dé yoy 
puoTiTéyXw 
and see xxvii. 204, xxix. 274, xxxiv. 144, xnvu. 732. Cf. also the disguise of the 
Phocians described by Herodotus (vit. 27). 















m The Titans 493 
~ 
oughly equivalent for ‘to purify.” Harpocration’ has an interest- 
note on the word ‘smear off’ (a7ouadttwv). ‘Others use it in 
‘a more special sense, as for example when they speak of putting 
a coat of clay or pitch on those who are being initiated, as we 
say to take a cast of a statue in clay; for they used to besmear 
those who were being purified for initiation with clay and pitch. In 
this ceremony they were mimetically enacting the myth told by 
some persons, in which the Titans, when they mutilated Dionysos, 
wore a coating of gypsum in order not to be identified. The 
custom fell into disuse, but in later days they were plastered with 
gypsum out of convention (vouiwov yap). Here we have the 
definite statement that in rites of initiation the worshippers were 
coated with gypsum. The ‘some persons’ who tell the story of 
Dionysos and the Titans are clearly Orphics. Originally, Harpo- 
eration says, the Titans were coated with gypsum that they might 
be disguised. Then the custom, by which he means the original 
object of the custom, became obsolete, but though the reason was 
lost the practice was kept up out of convention. They went on 
,doing what they no longer understood. 
_ Harpocration is probably right. Savages in all parts of the 
world, when about to perform their sacred mysteries, disguise 
themselves with all manner of religious war-paint. The motive 
is probably, like most human motives, mixed; they partly want 
to disguise themselves, perhaps from the influence of evil spirits, 
perhaps because they want to counterfeit some sort of bogey ; 
mixed with this is the natural and universal instinct to ‘dress 
up’ on any specially sacred occasion, in order to impress outsiders. 
An element in what was at once a disguise and a decoration was 
coloured clay. Then having become sacred from its use on sacred 
4 occasions it became itself a sort of medicine, a means of puri- 
fication and sanctification, as well as a ceremonial sign and token 
_ of initiation. Such performances went on not only in Crete but 
in civilized Athens. One of the counts brought by Demosthenes 
against Aeschines? was, it will be remembered (p. 418), ‘that he 
_ purified the initiated and wiped them clean with mud and pitch’ 
 —with, be it noted, not from. Cleansing with mud does not 
seem to us a practical procedure, but we are back in the state of 


OP may 


1 Harpocrat. s.v. dmoudtrTwv. ~ 
2 Dem. de Coron. § 259. 


> 





494 Orphic Mysteries [ OH. 


mind fully discussed in an earlier chapter (p. 39), when puri- 
fication was not physical cleansing in our sense of the word, but 
a thing at once lower and higher, a magical riddance from spiritual 
evil, from evil spirits and influences. For this purpose clay and 
pitch were highly efficacious. 

But what has all this to do with the Titans? Eustathius?, 
commenting on the word Titan, lets us into the secret. ‘We 
apply the word titanos in general to dust, in particular to what is 
called asbestos, which is the white fluffy substance in burnt stones. 
It is so called from the Titans in mythology, whom Zeus in the 
story smote with his thunderbolts and consumed to dust. For 
from them, the fine dust of stones which has got crumbled from 
excessive heat, so to speak Titanic heat, is called titanic, as 
though a Titanic penalty had been accomplished upon it. And 
the ancients call dust and gypsum titanos.’ 

This explanation is characteristically Eustathian. In his odd 
confused way the Archbishop, as so often, divines a real connection, 
but inverts and involves it. The simple truth is that the Titan 
myth is a ‘sacred story’ (‘epoAoyia) invented to account for the 
ritual fact that Orphic worshippers, about to tear the sacred bull, 
daubed themselves with white clay, for which the Greek word was 
titanos: they are Titans, but not as giants, only as white-clay- 
men. It is not exactly a false etymology, as the mythological 
Titan giant probably owed his name to the fact that he was clay- 
born, earth-born, like Adam, only of white instead of red earth ; 
but it was of course a false connection of meaning®. 

That this connection of meaning, this association of white-clay- 
men of the mysteries with primaeval giants, was late and fictitious 
is incidentally shown by the fact that it was fathered on Onoma- 
eritus. In the passage from Pausanias*® already quoted (p: 473), 
we are told that Onomacritus got the name of the Titans from 


1 Kustath. ad Il. m1. 735 § 332 riravoy dé kupiws Thy koviay pauév, Td dwwrikds 
Neybuevov doBerrov 7d év lows KeKaypévors yvodes NevKdv. EkAHOn OE oVTwWS ard Tov 
puOkdv Tirdvay ods 6 Tod wHOov Leds xepavvois Baroy xaréppvye. 6u’ adrods yap Kal 76 
é& ayay Todds Kavoews Kal ws olov elrety Tiravwoous dtarpupbev ev NiOots Newrdv Tlravos 
dvoudobn, ofa molvns tivds Tiravixns yevouévns kal év atrw. of dé maraol pace 
tiravos Kkovis yUwos, and see Eustath, 1676 where a child who sees snow for the 
first time is said to have mistaken it for riravos. 

* Since writing the above I find that my explanation of the Titans has been 
anticipated by Dr Dieterich, Rh. Mus. 1893, p. 280. His high authority is a welcome 
confirmation of my view. 

e Pi VME. Bt. 0, 


x| The Titans 495 


Homer, and composed ‘orgies’ for Dionysos, and made the Titans 
the actual agents in the sufferings of Dionysos. He did not invent 
the white-clay worshippers, but he gave them a respectable 
orthodox Homeric ancestry. What confusion and obscurity he 
thereby introduced is seen in the fact that a bad mythological 
precedent is invented for a good ritual act; all consistency was 
sacrificed for the sake of Homeric association. 


But nothing, nothing, no savage rite, no learned mythological . 


confusion, daunts the man bent on edification, the pious Orphiec. 


The task of spiritualizing the white-clay-men, the dismembered 
bull, was a hard one, but the Orphic thinker was equal to it. He 
has not only taken part in an absurd and savage rite, he has 
brooded over the real problems of man and nature. There is evil 
in the universe, human evil to which as yet he does not give the 
name of sin, for he is not engaged with problems of free-will, but 
something evil, something that mixes with and mars the good of 
life, and he has long called it impurity. His old religion has 
taught him about ceremonial cleansings and has brought hin, 
through conceptions like the Keres, very near to some crude 
notion of spiritual evil. The religion of Dionysos has forced him 
to take a momentous step. It has taught him not only what he 
knew before—that he can rid himself of impurity, but also that 
he can become a Bacchos, become divine. He seems darkly to see 
how it all came about, and how the old and the new work 
together. His forefathers, the Titans, though they were but 
‘dust and ashes, dismembered and ate the god; they did evil, 
and good came of it; they had to be punished, slain with thunder- 
bolts; but even in their ashes lived some spark of the divine; 
that is why he their descendant can himself become Bacchos. 
From these ashes he himself has sprung. It is only a little hope; 
there is all the element of dust and ashes from which he must 
cleanse himself; it will be very hard, but he goes back with fresh 
zeal to the ancient rite, to eat the bull-god afresh, renewing 
the divine within him. 

Theology confirms his hope by yet another thought. Even 
the wicked Titans, before they ate Dionysos, had a heavenly 
ancestry ; they were children of old Ouranos, the sky-god, as well as 
of Ge, the earth-mother. His master Orpheus worshipped the sun 


‘ 


496 Orphic Mysteries — [ CH. 


(p. 462). Can he not too, believing this, purify himself from his 
earthly nature and rise to be the ‘child of starry heaven’? Perhaps 
it 1s not a very satisfactory theory of the origin of evil; but is the 
sacred legend of the serpent and the apple more illuminating ? 
Anyhow it was the faith and hope the Orphic, as we shall later 
see (p. 571), carried with him to his grave. 

There were other difficulties to perplex the devout enquirer. 
The god in the mysteries of Zagreus was a bull, but in the 
mysteries of Sabazios (p. 419) his vehicle was a snake, and these 
mysteries must also enshrine the truth. Was the father of the 
child a snake or a bull; was the ‘horned child’ a horned snake ? 
It was all very difficult. He could not solve the difficulty; so 
he embodied it in a little dogmatic verse, and kept it by him 
as a test of reverent submission to divine mysteries : 


‘The Snake’s Bull-Father—the Bull’s Father-Snakel’ 


The snake, the bull, the snake-bull-child*— not three Incompre- 
hensibles, but one Incomprehensible. On the altar of his Un- 
known God through all the ages man pathetically offers the 
holocaust of his reason. 

The weak point of the Orphic was, of course, that he could not, 
would not, break with either ancient ritual or ancient mythology, 
could not trust the great new revelation which bade him become 
‘divine, but must needs mysticize and reconcile archaic obsolete 
traditions. His strength was that in conduct he was steadfastly 
bent on purity of life. He could not turn upon the past and say, 
‘this daubing with white clay, this eating of raw bulls, is savage 
nonsense ; give it up.’ He could and did say, ‘this daubing with 
white clay and eating of raw bulls is not in itself enough, it must 
be followed up by arduous endeavour after holiness.’ 

This is clear from the further confession of the Cretan chorus, to 
which we return. From the time that the neophyte is accepted 


1 Tadpos Spdxovros kal dpdxwy ravpov maryp, frg. ap. Clem. Al. Protr. 1. 2. 12. 
What was made of such a reverent mystic dogma by the unsavoury minds of 
Christian fathers can be read by the curious. 

2 M. Salomon Reinach, who has done so much for the elucidation of Orphism, 
~ has shown that the Celts held in honour and depicted on their monuments a horned 
snake. Such a conception would keep up the confusion of bull and snake. He 
believes the original form of Zagreus to have been that of a horned snake. The 
point is an interesting one and is evidence of Northern elements in Orphie as well 
as Dionysiac conceptions, see Rev. Arch. 1899, vol. xxxv. p. 210, S. Reinach, 
‘Zagreus le serpent cornu.’ 


x] The Mountain Mother 497 


‘as such, i.e. performs the initiatory rites of purification and thereby 
becomes a Mystes, he leads a life of ceremonial purity (dyvov). He 
accomplishes the rite of eating raw sacrificial flesh and also holds 
on high the torches to the Mountain Mother. These characteristic 
acts of the Mystes, are, I think, all preliminary stages to the final 
climax, the full fruition, when, cleansed and consecrated by the 
Kouretes, he is named by them a Bacchos, he is made one with 


the god. 


Before we pass to the final act consummated by the Kouretes, 
the place of the Mountain Mother has to be considered. The 
mystic’s second avowal is that he has 


‘Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame’ 


In the myth of Zagreus, coming to us as it does through late authors, 
the child is all-important, the mother only present by implication. 
Zeus the late comer has by that time ousted Dionysos in Crete. 
The mythology of Zeus, patriarchal as it is through and through, 
lays no stress on motherhood. Practically the Zeus of the later 
Hellenism has no mother. But the bull-divinity worshipped in 
Crete was wholly the son of his mother, and in Crete most happily 
the ancient figure of the mother has returned after long burial to 
the upper air. On a Cretan seal Mr Arthur Evans found the 
beast-headed monster whom men called. Minotaur; on a Cretan 
seal also he found the figure of the Mountain Mother, found her 
at Cnossos, the place of the birth of the bull-child, Cnossos over- 
shadowed by Ida where within the ancient cave the holy child 
was born and the ‘ mailed priests’ danced at his birth. 

The design in fig. 147 is from the clay impression of a signet 
ring found at the palace at Cnossos*. It is a veritable little 


1 vy. 12 punrpi 7 dpeia Sadas dvacydv. In the recently discovered fragment of 
Timotheos (v. 135) it is to the ‘ Mountain Mother’ that the drowning sailor would 
pray: 

el duvara mpos jweNapmerado- 
xitwva Marpos ovpei- 
as deoméouva yovaTa TeECelV.... 
See Timotheos, Die Perser, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 1903. 

* Published and discussed by the discoverer Mr Evans in the Annual of the 
British School at Athens, vol#vi. 1900—1901, p. 29, fig. 9. The enlargement (?) here 
reproduced from the Annual is based on a restoration, but a perfectly certain one. 
A series of clay fragments impressed by the same seal, but not ftom the same 
impression, were found in a deposit of burnt wood. The various fragments overlapped 
sufficiently for certain reconstruction. When I first saw a drawing of the seal 
I was inclined to think it was ‘too good to be true,’ but by Mr Evans’ kindness. 


H. 32 


498 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


manual of primitive Cretan faith and ritual. On the very apex of 
her own great mountain stands the Mountain Mother. The 
Mycenaean women of Cnossos have made their goddess in their 
own image, clad her, wild thing though she was, in their own gro- 
tesque flounced skirt, and they give her for guardians her own fierce 
mountain-ranging lions, tamed into solemn heraldic guardians. We 


. 
“ 


aay ‘ "4 
PND. 


Fic. 147. 





know the lions well enough; they came to Mycenae to guard the 
great entrance-gate. Between them at Mycenae is a column, a 
thing so isolated and protected, that we long suspected it was no 
dead architectural thing but a true shrine of a divinity, and here 
on the Cretan seal the divinity has come to life. She stands with 
sceptre or lance extended, imperious, dominant. Behind her is 
her shrine of ‘Mycenaean’ type, with its odd columns and horns, 
these last surely appropriate enough to a cult whose central rite 
was the sacrifice of a bull; before her in rapt ecstasy of adoration 
stands her Mystes. 

Pre-historic Crete has yielded, I venture to think will yield, no 
figure of a dominant male divinity, no Zeus; so far we have only a 
beast-headed monster and the Mountain Mother. The little seal 


I was allowed while at Crete to examine the original fragments and am satisfied 
that the reconstruction is correct. We owe the most important monument of 
Mycenaean religion to the highly trained eye and extraordinarily acute perception 
of the excavator. 


x] The Kouretes 499 


impression is a standing monument of matriarchalism. In Greece 
the figure of the Son was developed in later days, the relation of 
Mother and Son almost forgotten; child and parent were repre- 
sented by the figures of the Mother and the Daughter. It matters 
very little what names we give the shifting pairs. In Thrace, in 
Asia Minor, in Crete, the primitive form is the Mother with the 
Son as the attribute of Motherhood; the later form the Son with 
the Mother as the attribute of Sonship. A further development is 
the Son with only a faded Mother in the background, Bacchos 
and Semele; next the Son is made the Son of his Father, 
Bacchos is Dionysos; finally he eclipses his Father and reigns 
omnipotent as Zeus-Hades. The Mother with the Son as attribute 
came back from Asia Minor to Greece when in Greece the Mother 
was but the appendage of the Son, and coming made sore con- 
fusion for mythology. But for prehistoric Crete, for the Cretan 
mystic of Kuripides in the days of Minos, the ritual is of the 
Mother and the Son. 


The ‘mystic’ holds aloft the torches of the mother. Fire as 
well as water is for cleansing. He is finally consecrated (ocvwOels) 
by the Kouretes: 


‘I am Set Free and named by name 
A Bacchos os: the Mailed Priests!’ 

The Kouretes need not long detain us. They are the Cretan 
brothers of the Satyrs, the local Satyrs of Crete. Hesiod? knows 
of their kinship: from the same parent 

‘The goddesses, nymphs of the mountain, had their being, 
And the race of the worthless do-nothing Satyrs, 
And the divine Kouretes, lovers of sport and dancing.’ 

Hesiod’s words are noteworthy and characteristic of his theo- 
logical attitude. The Satyrs, we have seen (p. 380), are Satraz, 
primitive Dionysos-worshippers of Thrace and Thessaly. Seen 
through the hostile eyes of their conquerors they have suffered 
distortion and degradation in form as in content, they are horse- 
men, worthless, idle. The Kouretes have just the same beginning 


1 Kat Koupyrey 

Baxxos ExAnOnv dowbels. 

The word dowels is rendered ‘Set Free’ by Mr Murray in his translation for 
reasons explained later, p. 504. 


2 Hes. firg. cxxix. ap. Strab. x. p. 323. 
32-2 


500 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


in actuality, but their mythological ending is different. They are 
seen, not through the distorting medium of conquest, but with the 
halo of religion about their heads; they are divine (@eoc) and their 
dancing is sacr ed. It all depends on the point of view. : 

Strabo, in his important discussion of the Kouretes and kindred — 
figures, knows that they are all ministers (77pdc7rodox) of orgiastic 
deities, of Rhea and of Dionysos; he knows also that Kouretes, 
Korybantes, Daktyloi, Telchines and the like represent primitive 
populations. What bewilders him is the question which particular 
form originated the rest and where they all belong. Did Mother 
Rhea send her Korybants to Crete ? how do the Kouretes come to 
be in Aetolia? Why are they sometimes servants of Rhea, some-— 
times of Dionysos? why are some of them magicians, some of them 
handicraftsmen, some of them mystical priests? In the light of 
Prof. Ridgeway’s investigations, discussed in relation to the Satyrs 
(p. 385), all that puzzled Strabo is made easy to us. 

The Kouretes then are, as their name betokens, the young male > 
population considered as worshipping the young male god, the~ 
Kouros; they are ‘mailed priests’ because the young male popula- 
tion were naturally warriors. They danced their local war-dance— 
over the new-born child, and, because in those early days the 
worship of the Mother and the Son was not yet sundered, they 
were attendants (a7pda7odo) on the Mother also. They are in 
fact the male correlatives of the Maenads as Nurses (ti@nvav). The 
women-nurses were developed most fully, it seems, in Greece proper; 
the male attendants, in Asia Minor and the islands. * 

In the fusion and confusion of these various local titles given to 
primitive worshippers, this blend of Satyrs, Korybants, Daktyls, 
Telchines, so confusing in literature till its simple historical basis — 
is grasped, one equation is for our purpose important—Kouretes — 
=Titans. The Titans of ritual, it has been shown, are men be-— 
daubed with white earth, The Titans of mythology are children 
of Earth, primitive giants rebellious against the new Olympian 
order. Diodorus? knows of a close connection between Titans and 
Kouretes and attempts the usual genealogical explanation. The 
Titans, he says, are, according to some, sons of one of the Kouretes— 
and of a mother called Titaia; according to others of Ouranos and 


1 Diod. vy. 66. 


ze | Hosiot and Hosia 501 


Ge. Titaia is mother Earth. The Cretans, he says, allege that the 
Titans were born in the age of the Kouretes and that the Titans 
settled themselves in the district of Cnossos ‘where even now there 
are shown the site and foundations of a house of Rhea and a 
cypress grove dedicated from ancient days.’ The Titans as 
Kouretes worshipped the Mother, and were the guardians of the 
Son, the infant Zagreus, to whom later monotheism gave the 
name of Zeus. 


From the time that the neophyte enters the first stage of 
initiation, Le.: becomes a ‘mystic’ (uvaorns), he leads a life of 
abstinence (ayvov). But abstinence is not the end. Abstinence, 
the sacramental feast of raw flesh, the holding aloft of the 
Mother’s torches, all these are but preliminary stages to ‘the 
final climax, the full fruition when, cleansed and consecrated, he 
is made one with the god and the Kouretes name him ‘ Bacchos.’ 

The word ayvoy, i.e. ‘pure, in the negative sense, ‘free from 
evil, marks, I think, the initial stage—a stage akin to the old 
service of ‘aversion’ (azrotpo7n). The word ootwGeis, ‘set free, 
‘consecrated, marks the final accomplishment and is a term of 
positive content. It is characteristic of orgiastic, ‘enthusiastic’ 
rites, those of the Mother and the Son, and requires some further 
elucidation. 


THE Hostor AND Hosta. 


At Delphi there was an order of priests known as Hosioi. 
Plutarch is our only authority for their existence, but, for Delphic 
matters, we could have no better source. In his 9th Greek 
Question he asks' ‘who is the Hosioter among the Delphians, 
and why do they call one of their months Bysios?’’ The second 
part of the question only so far concerns us as it marks a connec- 
tion between the Hosioter and the month Bysios, which, Plutarch 
tells us, was at the ‘beginning of spring, the ‘time of the 
blossoming of many plants.’ On the-8th day of this month fell 


1 Plut. Q. Gr. 1x. Tis 6 mapa Aedgois “Oowwrnp Kai dia Th Biovov va rev unvaev 
kahovow; “Oowwrijpa pév Kadovar Td Ovduevor icpeiov, bray “Ooros droderxOy, mévte 5é 
elow dovor d1a Blov Kal TH woANG META THY TpopyTar OpBow otra Kai ovyLepoupyovau, 
are yeyovévat doxovvtes amd Aevkadiwvos. Stephanos comments ‘mendose ut videtur 
pro rov Ovduevov, accipiendo sc. duduevoy active pro Ovovra...Recte autem habet 
TO Si quidem ‘Oo.wryp (radpos) est Hostia quae immolatur.’ 


502 Orphic Mysteries (cH. 


the birthday of the god and in olden times ‘on this day only 
did the oracle give answers.’ 4 

Plutarch’s answer to his question is as follows: ‘They call 
Hosioter the animal sacrificed when a Hosios is designated’ He 
does not say how the animal’s fitness was shown, but from another 
passage’ we learn that various tests were applied to the animals 
to be sacrificed, to see if they were ‘pure, unblemished and un- 
corrupt both in body and soul. As to the body Plutarch says 
it was not very difficult to find out. As to the soul the test 
for a bull was to offer him barley-meal, for a he-goat vetches; if 
the animal did not eat, it was pronounced unhealthy. A she-goat, 
being more sensitive, was tested by being sprinkled with cold 
water. These tests were carried on by the Hosioi and by the 
‘prophets’ (7pod7taz), these last being concerned with omens as 
to whether the god would give oracular answers. The animal, ~ 
we note, became Hosios when he was pronounced unblemished and 
hence fit for sacrifice: the word 6cvos, it appears, carried with it 
the double connotation of purity and consecration; it was used 
of a thing found blameless and then made over to, accepted by, 
the gods. 

The animal thus consecrated was called Hosioter, which means 
‘He who consecrates.’ We should expect such a name to be applied 
to the consecrating priest rather than the victim. If Plutarch’s 
statement be correct, we can only explain Hosioter on the suppo- 
sition that the sacrificial victim was regarded as an incarnation of 
the god. If the victim was a bull, as in Crete, and was regarded 
as divine, the title. would present no difficulties. 

That the Hosioter was not merely a priest is practically certain 
from the fact that there were, as already noted, priests who bore 
the cognate title of Hosioi. Of them we know, again from Plutarch, 
some further important particulars. They performed rites—as in 
the case of the testing of the victims—in conjunction with the 
‘prophets’ or utterers of the oracle, but they were not identical 
with them. On one occasion, the priestess while prophesying had 
some sort of fit, and Plutarch? mentions that not only did all the 
seers run away but also the prophet and ‘those of the Hosioi that 
were present.’ 


1 Plut. de Defect. Orac. xuix. ol yap lepe’s Kal Ovew pact 7d iepetov KTX. 
2 Plut. de Defect. Orac. Lt. 





x] Hosiot and Hosia 503 


In the answer to his ‘ Question’ about the Hosioter, Plutarch 
states definitely that the Hosioi were five in number, were elected 
for life, and that’ they did many things and performed sacred 
sacrifices with the ‘prophets.’ Yet they were clearly not the 
same’, A suspicion of the real distinction dawns upon us when 
he adds that they were reputed to be descended from Deucalion. 
Deucalion marks Thessalian ancestry and Thessaly looks North. We 
begin to surmise that the Hosioi were priests of the immigrant cult 
of Dionysos. This surmise approaches certainty when we examine 
the actual ritual which the Hosioi performed. 

It will be remembered? that when Plutarch is describing the 
ritual of the Bull Dionysos, he compares it, in the matter of 
‘tearings to pieces’ and burials and new births, to that of Osiris. 
Osiris has his tombs in Egypt and ‘the Delphians believe that 
the fragments of Dionysos are buried near their oracular shrine, 
and the Hosioi offer a secret sacrifice (@vciavy amoppnrorv) in the 
sanctuary of Apollo at the time when the Thyiades wake up 
Liknites’ To clinch the argument Lycophron® tells us that 
Agamemnon before he sailed 

‘Secret lustrations to the Bull did make 

Beside the caves of him the God of Gain 

Delphinios,’ 
and that in return for this Bacchus Enorches overthrew Telephos, 
tangling his feet in a vine. The scholiast commenting on the 
‘secret lustrations’ says, ‘because the mysteries were celebrated to 
Dionysos in a corner. It is, I think, clear that the mysteries of 
Liknites at Delphi, like those of Crete, included the sacrifice of a 
sacred bull, and that the bull at Delphi was called Hosioter, that, 
in a word, Hosioi and Hosioter are ritual terms specially linked 
with the primitive mysteries of Dionysos. 

The word Hosios was then, it would seem, deep-rooted in the 
savage ritual of the Bull; but with its positive content, its notion 
of consecration, it lay ready to hand as a vehicle to express the 


1 Nikitsky, Delphisch-Epigraphische Studien p.145, points out that in inscriptions 
two hereditary families of priests are traceable; these he thinks may correspond 
with the rpopjra or utterers whom he holds to be Apolline and the écv0c who are 
manifestly Dionysiac. His book is in Russian, and I only know it at second hand. 

* Plut. de Is. et Os. xxxv. and see p. 441. Had the treatise by Socrates zrepi 
‘Ociwy which Plutarch refers to been preserved, we should have been informed. 

3 aye. Al. 207 and schol. ad loc. radpos 5€ 6 Acédyucos...é7. &v mapaBtoTrw Td 
puoTipia éredeito TH Acoviicw. 


504 Orphie Mysteries [ CH. 


new Orphic doctrine of identification with the divine. Its use was 
not confined to Dionysiac rites, though it seems very early to have — 
been specialized in relation to them, probably because the Orphiecs 
always laid stress on fas rather than nefas. In ancient curse- 
formularies, belonging to the cult of Demeter’ and underworld 
divinities, the words écva kai €XevOepa, ‘consecrated and free, are 
used in constant close conjunction and are practically all but 
equivalents. The offender, the person cursed, was either ‘sold’ or 
‘bound down’ to the infernal powers; but the cursing worshipper 
prays that the things that are accursed, Le. tabooed to the offender, 
may to him be dara Kai édevGepa, ‘consecrated and free, ie. to 
him they are freed from the taboo. It is the dawning of the 
grace in use to-day ‘Sanctify these creatures to our use and us to 
thy service’; it is the ritual forecast of a higher guerdon, ‘Ye shall 
know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ 

This primitive notion of release from taboo, which lay at the 
root of the Orphic and Christian notion of spiritual freedom, comes 
out very clearly in the use of the word agoo.otc@a. For this 
word we have no exact English equivalent, but it may be rendered 
as ‘to purify by means of an expiatory offering.’ Plato in the 
Laws describes the ceremonial to be performed in the case of a 
man who has intentionally murdered one near of kin. The regular 
officials are to put him to death, and this done ‘let them strip 
him, and cast him outside the city into a place where three ways 
meet, appointed for the purpose, and on behalf of the city collec- 
tively let the authorities, each one severally, take a stone and cast 
it on the head of the dead man, and thereby purify (ahociovT@) 
the city. The significance of this ritual is drastically explicit. 
The taint of the murder, the taboo of the blood-guilt, is on the 
whole city ; the casting of the stones, on behalf of the city, purifies 
it off on to the criminal; it is literally conveyed from one to 
other by the stone. The guilty man is the pharmakos, and his 
fate is that of a pharmakos; ‘this done let them carry him to 
the confines of the city, and cast him out unburied, as is ordained.’ 
Dedication, devotion of the thing polluted, agdociwers, is the means 
whereby man attains ogiwovs, consecration. The scholiast*® on the 

1 C. T. Newton, Discoveries at Cnidos p. 735 and Inse. 88, 83 ete. 

2\Plat. Legg. 873 3B, schol. ad loc. dgocioitw] Kxabatpérw, ws viv, 7 dmapxas 


MpocayeTw, 7) TLudTw, | THY emi OavaTw amodiddTw TiuAY, 7 wAnpopopeirw. I owe the 
reference to this interesting passage to Mr £. M. Cornford. I am not sure what the 


eal Hosiot and Hosia 505 


passage has an interesting gloss on the word ddociovtw. ‘It is 
used,’ he says, ‘as in this passage, to mean “to purify,” or “to bring 
first-fruits,” or “to give honour,” or “to give a meed of honour 
on the occasion of death,” or “to give fulfilment.”’ He feels dimly 
the shifts and developments of meaning. You can devote, ‘make 
over’ a pharmakos ; you can devote, consecrate first-fruits, thereby 
releasing the rest from taboo; you can consecrate a meed of 
honour on the occasion of death, 

In this connection it is interesting to note the well-known fact 
that in common Greek parlance édcvos is the actual opposite of 
tepos. Suidas? tells us that a écvov ywpiov is ‘a place on which 
you may tread, which is not sacred, into which you may go. He 
quotes from the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, where a woman with 
child prays : 

‘O holy Eileithyia, keep back the birth 
Until I come unto a place allowed, 

He further notes the distinction often drawn by the orators 
between goods that are sacred ((epa) and those that are (in the 
Latin sense) profane (écra). The contrast is in fact only fully 
intelligible when we go back to the primitive notions, under a 
taboo, released from a taboo. The notion ‘released from a taboo’ 
was sure to be taken up by a spiritual religion, a religion that 
aimed at expansion, liberation, enthusiasm rather than at check, 
negation, restraint. If we may trust Suidas, the word dcvo. was 
applied to those who ‘were nurtured in piety, even if they were 
not priests. The early Christians owed some of their noblest 
instincts to Orphism. 

As we find davos contrasted with ‘epds, so also between the 
two kindred words xa@aipw and oovow a distinction may be 
observed. Both denote ‘purification, but ocidw marks a stage 
more final and complete. It is the word chosen to describe the 
state of those who are fully initiated. Plutarch? says that the 
souls of men pass, by a natural and divine order, from mortal men 
to heroes, from heroes to daemons, and finally, if they are com- 
pletely purified and consecrated (ca@ap0aor Kai oo1wOdcw), as if 
scholiast means by the post-classical word mAnpopopéw ; the passive means in 
the New Testament ‘to have full assurance’ of faith and the like. It may point 
to the final stage of initiation. 


1 Suidas s.v. dcvos, dovoy xwpiov. 
2 Plut. Vit. Rom. 28. 


506 Orphie Mysteries | [ CH. 


by a rite of initiation they pass from daemons to the gods. Lucian? 
again in speaking of the final stage of initiation reserved for 
hierophants uses the word ‘consecrated’ (@c1@Oncav). 
Plutarch? makes another interesting suggestion. In a wild 
attempt to glorify Osiris and make him the god of everything, he 
derives his name from the two adjectives dovos and (epds, and 
incidentally lets fall this suggestive remark, ‘the name of Osiris 
is so compounded because his significance is compounded of things 
in heaven and things in Hades. It was customary among the 
ancients to call the one éova the other tepa.’ The things of the 
underworld are écva; of the upper sky, things Ouranian, (epa. 
Translated into ritual, this means that the old underworld rites 
already discussed, the rites of the primitive Pelasgian stratum of 
the population, were known as 6ova, the new burnt sacrifices of the 
Ouranians or Olympians were (epd. Dionysos was of the old order: 
his rites were 6ova, burial rites were dova. It was the work of 
Orpheus to lift these rites from earth to heaven, but spiritualized, 
uplifted as they are, they remain in their essence primitive. It 
is because of this peculiar origin that there is always about dcvos 
something of an antique air; it has that ‘imprint of the ancient,’ 
that ‘crust and patina’ of archaism, which Jamblichus* says were 
characteristic of things Pythagorean, and which, enshrining as it 
does a new life and impulse, lends to Orphism a grace all its own. 
Moreover, though écvos is so ‘free’ that it verges on the 
profane, the secular, yet it is the freedom always of consecration, 
not desecration; it is the negation of the Law, but only by the 
Gospel. Hence, though this may seem paradoxical, it is concerned 
rather with the Duty towards God, than the Duty towards our 
Neighbour. Rising though it does out of form, it is so wholly 
aloof from formalism, that it tends to become the ‘unwritten law.’ 
Hence such constant oppositions as od gus od8 Gavor, ‘allowed by 
neither human prescription nor divine law, and again ovd’ dovov 
ov6é Sixavov, ‘right neither in the eye of God nor of man.’ Plato* 


1 Lucian, Lexiphan. 10. 

2 Plut. de Is. et Os. uxt. 6 “Oorpis Ex Tod dclou Kal lepod robvoua memeymévov ErxnKe- 
kowds yap éott Tov €v ovpave Kal rv év adov Nbyos. wy Ta wey lepa Ta dE bora Tots 
madaois <t00s?> Hv mpocayopevew. It is practically certain that ra mév refers to 
the first mentioned class, i.e. Ta év ovpare. 

% Tambl. Vit. Pythag. 58 xapaxryp madaorpbmos...dpxacorpémov 5¢ Kal madacod 
mlvou. 


4 Plat. Gorg. p. 507 B. 


x] Hosioi and Hosia 507 


says ‘he who does what is proper in relation to man, would be said 
to do just things (8/«ava), he who does what is proper towards God, 
holy things (écva). Hence finally the spiritual illumination and 
advance of é01a wavoupyncac *, breaking through human Justice 
for the Divine Right, the duty, sacred, sacrosanct, of rebellion. 


The Greeks had their goddess Dike, she who divides and appor- 
tions things mortal, who according to Hesiod? was sister of the lovely 
human figures, Fair Order and Peace. But, because she was human, 
she carried the symbol of human justice, the sword. She lapses 
constantly into Vengeance. The Bacchants of Euripides’ are fully 
initiated, consecrated as well as cleansed, yet in their hour of 
extreme need it is to this Goddess of Vengeance they cry for 
visible, physical retribution on the blasphemer Pentheus: 

‘Hither for doom and deed, 
Hither with lifted sword, 
Justice, Wrath of the Lord, 
Come in our visible need, 
Smite till the throat shall bleed, 
Smite till the heart shall bleed 
Him the tyrannous, lawless, godless, Echion’s earth-born seed.’ 

Orpheus did all he could to raise the conception of Dike. We 
are expressly told that it was he who raised her to be the ‘ Assessor 
of Zeus. Demosthenes* pleads with his fellow citizens to honour 
Fair Order (Edvoyuia), who loves just deeds and is the Saviour of 
cities and countries, and Justice (Dike), holy and unswerving, whom 
Orpheus who instituted our most sacred mysteries declares to be 
seated by the throne of Zeus. The dating of Orphic hymns is 
precarious, but 1t looks as though Demosthenes had in his mind 
the Orphic Hymn to Dike’ or at least its prototype: 

‘I sing the all-seeing eye of Dike of fair form, 

Who sits upon the holy throne of Zeus 

The king, and on the life of mortals doth look down, 
And heavy broods her justice on the unjust.’ 

The Orphic could not rid himself of the notion of Vengeance. 
Dike as avenger finds a place, it will be seen later (p. 612), in the 
Orphic Hades. Hosia, the real Heavenly Justice, she who is 
Right and Sanctity and Freedom and Purity all in one, never 


1 Soph. Ant. 74. 2 Hes. Theog. 901. 
3 Eur. Bacch. 991 irw Aixa pavepds itw Ecpnpdpos. 
4 Dem. c. Aristogeit. xxv. 11. 5 Orph. Hymn. uxu. 


508 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


attained a vivid and constant personality ; she is a goddess for the 
few, not the many; only Euripides? called her by her heavenly name 
and made his Bacchants sing to her a hymn: 

‘Thou Immaculate on high ; 

Thou Recording Purity ; 

Thou that stoopest, Golden Wing, 

Earthward, manward, pitying, 

Hearest thou this angry king ?’ 


It was Euripides, and perhaps only Euripides, who made the 
goddess Hosia in the image of his own high desire, and, though the 
Orphic word and Orphic rites constantly pointed to a purity that 
was also freedom, to a sanctity that was by union with rather than 
submission to the divine, yet Orphism constantly renounced its 
birth-right, reverted as it were to the old savage notion of absti- 
nence (ayveia). After the ecstasy of 


‘IT am Set Free and named by name 
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests,’ 


the end of the mystic’s confession falls dull and sad and formal : 


‘Robed in pure white I have borne me clean 
From man’s vile birth and coffined clay, 
And exiled from my lips alway 

Touch of all meat where Life hath been?’ 


He that is free and holy (oovweis) and divine, marks his divinity 
by a dreary formalism. He wears white garments, he flies from 
death and birth, from all physical contagion, his lips are pure 
from flesh-food, he fasts after as before the Divine Sacrament. 
‘ He follows in fact all the rules of asceticism familiar to us as 
‘ Pythagorean.’ 

Diogenes Laertius® in his life of Pythagoras gives a summary 
of these prescriptions, which show but too sadly and clearly the 
reversion to the negative purity of abstinence (dyvela). ‘ Purifica- 


1 Bur. Bacch. 370 ‘Ocla rérva Oey. It is worth noting in connection with the 
‘Oola of Euripides, that on tomb-inscriptions in Phrygia, and so far as at present 
known only there, dedications occur to a divinity bearing the titles éavos kat 
dixatos. These inscriptions are of Roman date, and it is usual to refer them to 
Mithras worship, but, found as they are in Phrygia, the home of the Bacchants, it 
is possible, I think, that they may indicate an old tradition of Cybele worship. See 
Roscher s.v. Hosios. 

2 ‘ amdddevxa 5 éxwr eluata peviyw 7 

yéverlv Te Bpordv Kal vexpoOAxns 
ov xpiumromevos, THY T EupdXov 
Bpdow édecrav trept\ayma. 

5 Diog. Laert. Vit. Pyth. 19 § 33. 


a 





x] Orphic Asceticism 509 


tion, they say, is by means of cleansings and baths and aspersions, 
and because of this a man must keep himself from funerals and 
marriages and every kind of physical pollution, and abstain from 
all food that is dead or has been killed, and from mullet and from 
the fish melanurus, and from eggs, and from animals that lay eggs, 
and from beans, and from the other things that are forbidden by 
those who accomplish holy rites of initiation.’ The savage origin 
of these fasfings and taboos on certain foods has been discussed ; 
they are deep-rooted in the ritual of azrotpomn, of aversion, which 
fears and seeks to evade the physical contamination of the Keres 
inherent in all things. Plato', in his inverted fashion, realizes that 
the Orphic life was a revival of things primitive. In speaking of the 
golden days before the altars of the gods were stained with blood, 
when men offered honey cakes and fruits of the earth, he says then 
it was not holy (éovov) to eat or offer flesh-food, but men lived a 
sort of ‘Orphic’ life, as it is called. 

Poets and philosophers, then as now, sated and hampered by 
the complexities and ugliness of luxury, looked back with longing 
eyes to the old beautiful gentle simplicity, the picture of which 
was still before their eyes in antique ritual, in the écva, the rites 
of the underworld gods—those gods who in their beautiful con- 
servatism kept their service cleaner and simpler than the lives 
of their worshippers. Sophocles* in the lost Polyidos tells of the 
sacrifice ‘ dear to these gods’: 

‘Wool of the sheep was there, fruit of the vine, 

Libations and the treasured store of grapes. 

And manifold fruits were there, mingled with grain 

And oil of olive, and fair curious combs 

Of wax compacted by the yellow bee.’ 
Some of these gods, it has been seen, would not taste of the 
fruit of the vine: such were at Athens the Sun, the Moon, the 
Dawn, the Muses, the. Nymphs, Mnemosyne and Ourania. To 
them the Athenians*, who were careful in matters of religion 
(dcv01), brought only sober offerings, nephalia; and such an offering 
we have seen was brought to Dionysos-Hades. Philochoros‘, to 
our great surprise, extends the list of wineless divinities to 


1 Plat. Legg. vi. p. 782. 
2 Soph. frg. 464, ap. Porphyr. de Abst, 11. p. 134, 
3 Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 100. 
* Philoch. irg. 30, ap. Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 99. 


510 Orphic Mysteries [ OH. : 


Dionysos. Plutarch’ knows the custom of the wineless libation 
to Dionysos, and after the fashion of his day explains it as an 
ascetic protest. In his treatise on ‘the Preservation of Health’ 
he says, ‘ We often sacrifice nephalia to Dionysos, accustoming 
ourselves rightly not to desire unmixed wine. The practice is 
manifestly a survival in ritual of the old days before Dionysos took 
possession of the vine, or rather the vine took possession of him. 

Empedokles had taught men that ‘to fast from evil’ was a 
great and divine thing; it is not surprising that the ‘ wineless ’ rites 
became to those who lived the Orphic life the symbol, perhaps 
the sacrament, of their spiritual abstinence. Plutarch we know 
(p. 628) was suspected by his robuster friends of Orphism, and 
probably with good reason. In his dialogue on ‘Freedom from 
Anger’ he? makes one of the speakers, who is transparently him- 
self, tell how he conquered his natural irritability. He set himself 
to observe certain days as sacred, on which he would not get angry, 
just as he might have abstained from getting drunk or taking any 
wine, and these ‘angerless days’ he offered to God as ‘.Nephalia’ 
or ‘ Melisponda, and then he tried a whole month, and then two, 
till he was cured. Toa greater than Plutarch, a priest who was 
poet also, the wineless sacrifice of the Kumenides* is charged 
with sacramental meaning; the rage of the king is over, in his 
heart is meekness, in his hands olive, shorn wool, water and 
honey; so only may he enter their sanctuary, ‘he sober and they 
wineless.’ 

In the confession of the Orphic there is no mention of wine, 
no avowal of having sacramentally drunk it, no resolve to abstain. 
The Bacchos, with whom the mystic is made one, is the ancient 
Bull-god, lord of the life of Nature, rather than Bromios, god of 
intoxication. Also it must not be forgotten that the mystic is 
a votary of the Mother as well as the Son, and though the Mother 
is caught and carried away in the later revels of the Son, she is 
never goddess of the vine. It is noteworthy that the later 
Orphics turned rather to the Mother than the Son; they revived 
the ancient rite of earth to earth burial, supplanted for a time by 
cremation, and the house of Pythagoras‘ was called by the people 


1 Plut. de tuend. sanit. xv. 2 Plut. de cohibend. ir. xvr. sub fin. 
8 Soph. Oed. Col. 100, vidwv dolvos, and schol. ad loc. 
4 Diog. Laert. Vit. Pythag: xv., and see p. 91. 


A 
i 





x] Orphic Asceticism 511 


of Metapontum the ‘ temple of Demeter.’ Pythagoras never insisted 
on ‘ total abstinence, but he told his disciples that if they would 
drink plain water they would be clearer in head as well as healthier 
in body. In the ancient rites of the Mother, rites instituted 
before the coming of the grape, they found the needful divine 
precedent’: 

‘Then Metaneira brought her a cup of honey-sweet wine, 

But the goddess would not drink it, she shook her head for a sign, 

For red wine she might not taste, and she bade them bring her meal 

And water and mix it together, and mint that is soft to feel. 


Metaneira did her bidding and straight the posset she dight, 
And holy Deo took it and drank thereof for a rite.’ 


It is strange that Orpheus if he came from the North, the 
land of Homeric banquets, should have preached abstinence from 
flesh: if he was of Cretan origin the difficulty disappears. 
Perhaps also such abstinence is a necessary concomitant of a 
mysticism that asks for nothing short of divinity. The mystic 
Porphyry? says clearly that his treatise on ‘Abstinence from 
Animal Food’ is not meant for soldiers or for athletes; for these 
flesh food may be needful. He writes for those who would lay 
aside every weight and ‘entering the stadium naked and un- 
clothed would strive in the Olympic contest of the soul.” And 
a great modern mystic*, looking more deeply and more humbly 
into the mystery of things natural, writes as follows: 

‘Toute notre justice, toute notre morale, tous nos sentiments et 
toutes nos pensées dérwent en somme de trois ow quatre besoins 
primordiaux, dont le principal est celui de la nourriture. La 
mowndre modification de lun de ces besoins aménerait des changements 
considérables dans notre vie morale. Maeterlinck believes, as 
Pythagoras did, that those who abstain from flesh food ‘ont senti 
leurs forces s’accroitre, leur santé se rétablir ou s'affermar, lewr esprit 
salléger et se purifier, comme au sortir d'une prison séculaire 
nauséabonde et misérable.’ 

But the plain carnal man in ancient Athens would have none 
of this. What to him are éova, things hallowed to the god, as 
compared with voyrwa, things consecrated by his own usage? So 


1 Hom. Hymn. ad Cer. 205—210 

de~auévn 8 doins éréBn moduTOTYLa Ane. 
2 Porphyr. de Abst. u. 4 and. 31. 
3 Maeterlinck, Le Temple enseveli, p. 188. 


512 — Orphic Mysteries [CH. 


Demosthenes taunts Aeschines, because he cries aloud ‘ Bad have 
I fled, better have I found’; so Theseus}, the bluff warrior, hates 
Hippolytos, not only, or perhaps not chiefly, because he believes 
him to be a sinner, but because he is an Orphic, righteous over- 
much. All his rage of flesh and blood breaks out against the 
prig and the ascetic. 

‘Now is thy day! Now vaunt thee; thou so pure, 

No flesh of life may pass thy lips! Now lure 

Fools after thee ; call Orpheus King and Lord, 

Make ecstasies and wonders! Thumb thine hoard 

Of ancient scrolls and ghostly mysteries. 

Now thou art caught and known. Shun men like these, 

I charge ye all! With solemn words they chase 

Their prey, and in their hearts plot foul disgrace.’ 

Happily there were in Athens also those who did not hate but 
simply laughed, laughed aloud genially and healthily at the outward 
absurdities of the thing, at all the mummery and hocus-pocus 
to which the lower sort of Orphic gave such solemn intent. 
Among these genial scoffers was Aristophanes. 


There isno more kindly and delightful piece of fooling than the 
scene in the Clouds? in which he deliberately and in detail parodies 
the Orphic mysteries. The tension of Orphism is great; it is, like 
all mysticisms, a state of mind intrinsically and necessarily tran- 
sient, and we can well imagine that, in his ighter moods, the most 
pious of Orphics might have been glad to join the general fun. In 
any case it helps us to realize vividly both the mise-en-scéne of the 
mysteries themselves and the attitude of the popular mind towards 
them. Exactly what particular rite is selected for parody we do 
not know ; probably some lesser mystery of purification, for there 
is no allusion to the supreme sacramental feast of bull’s flesh nor 
to the idea that the neophyte is made one with the god. 

The old unhappy father Strepsiades comes to the ‘Thinking- 
Shop’ of Sokrates that he may learn to evade his creditors 
by dexterity of speech and new-fangled sophistries in general. 
A disciple opens the door with reluctance and warns Strepsiades 
that he cannot reveal these ‘mysteries’ to the chance comer. 
Strepsiades enters and sees a number of other disciples lost in 

1 Eur. Hipp. 952. 


2 Ar. Nub, 223 ff. That this scene is in intent a parody of Orphic ceremonial 
was first observed by Dr Dieterich, Rh. Mus. 1898, p. 275. 





Be | Aristophanes on Orphism 513 


the contemplation of earth and heaven. He calls for Sokrates 
and is answered by a voice up in the air. 


‘Sok. Why dost thou call me, Creature of a Day? 

Str. First tell me please, what are you doing up there? 

Sok. I walk in air and contemplate the Sun.’ 

Here is the first Orphic touch. Sokrates instead of climbing 
a mountain has taken an easier way: he is suspended in a basket, 
and, Orpheus-like, reveres the Sun. The mysteries are not 
Eleusinian, not of the underworld. The comedian might and 
did dare to bring the Mystics of Kore and Iacchos in Hades on 
the stage, but a direct parody of the actwal ceremony of initiation 
at Eleusis would scarcely have been tolerated by orthodox Athens. 
The Eleusinian rites had become by that time a state religion, 
politically and socially sacred (vouspa). The Orphics were Dis- 
senters, and a parody of Orphic mysteries was an appeal at once to 
popular prejudice and popular humour. Sokrates explains that 
he is sitting aloft to avoid the intermixture of earthly elements in 
his contemplation ; again we have a skit on the Orphic doctrine 
of the double nature of man, earthly and heavenly, and the need 
for purification from earthly Titanic admixture. 
After some preliminary nonsense Strepsiades tells his need, 

and Sokrates descends and asks: 


‘Now, would you fain 
Know clearly of divine affairs, their nature 
When rightly apprehended ? 
Str. Yes, if I may. 

Sok. And would you share the converse of the Clouds, 

The spiritual beings we worship ? 

Str. Why, yes, rather. 
Sok. Then take your seat upon this sacred—campstool. 
Str. All right, I’m here. 
Sok. And now, take you this wreath. 

Str. A wreath—what for? Oh mercy, Sokrates, 

Don’t sacrifice me, I’m not Athamas! 
Sok. No, no. Dm only doing just the things 

We do at initiations.’ 


Strepsiades is of the old order; he knows nothing of these new 
‘spiritual beings’ worshipped by Orphics and sophists. Something 
religious and uncomfortable is going to be done to him, and his 
thoughts instinctively revert to the old order. A wreath suggests a 
sacrificial victim, and the typical victim is Athamas (p.61). Sokrates 
at once corrects him, and puts the audience on the right scent. 
It is not a common old-world sacrifice; it is an ‘initiation’ into a 


H, ae 


514 | Orphice Mysteries [on. 


new-fangled rite, in which it would appear the mystic was crowned, 
probably by way of consecration to the gods. Strepsiades is not 
clear about the use of such things: 
‘Str. Well, what good 
Shall I get out of it? 
Sok. Why, just this, you'll be 
A floury knave, uttering fine flowers of speech. 
Now just keep still. 
Str. By Jove, be sure you do it, 
Come flour me well, I’ll be a flowery knave1’ 

If any doubt were possible as to the nature of the ceremonies 
parodied, the words translated ‘flour’ (tpiuua, mavmddn) to pre- 
serve the pun, settle the matter. The word tp/upa means some- 
thing rubbed, pounded, «potados the noise made in rubbing and 
pounding; it might be rendered ‘rattle.’ wavsrddy is the fine 
flour or powder resulting from the process. Strepsiades is to 
become subtle in his arguments, a rattle in his speech. The 
words would have no sort of point but for the fact that Sokrates 
at the moment takes up two pieces of gypsum, pounds them 
together and bespatters Strepsiades till he is white all over like 
a Cretan mystic. The scholiast? is quite clear as to what was done 
on the stage. ‘Sokrates while speaking rubs together two friable 
stones, and beating them against each other collects the splinters 
and pelts the old man with them, as they pelt the victims with 
grain. He is quite right as to the thing done, quite wrong as to 
the ritual imitated. Strepsiades, as Sokrates said, is not being 
sacrificed ; it is not the ritual of sacrifice that is mimicked, but of 
initiation. 

The certainty that the scene is one of initiation, not sacrifice, 
is made more certain by the fact that Strepsiades is sitting all 
the while, not on an altar, but on a sort of truckle-bed or camp- 
stool (oxiumous). We have no evidence of the use of a oxiuzrous in 
mystic ritual, but it is clearly the comic equivalent of the seat or 
throne (@povos) used in Orphie rites. The candidate for initiation, 

1 Ar, Nub. 259 

xT. elra 6h rl xepdava; 
DQ. Adyew vyevyoer rpiupa, Kpdradov, mavrddy. 
adn’ &x’ arpeul, 
xT. wa rov Al’ od Wevoe yé me’ 
Karamarromevos yap maimadn yevrijcomat. 
2 Schol. ad Ar. Nub. 260 ratra perv Aéywv 6 Lwxparns Aldous me pit piBwv mwplvous 


4 \ J ‘ ‘ ‘ , ‘ ’ , LA 4 
kal Kpovwy mpos a\dAjNous TUvayayov Ta aro ToUTwWY Upavacmara Bade TOY mpecBiTny 
avrois kaddmep ra lepeta Tats ovals ol OvovTes. 





— 


x] Aristophanes on Orphism 515 


whether Eleusinian or Orphic, was always seated, and the cere- 
mony was known as the ‘seating’ or enthronement. Dion 
Chrysostom! says those who perform initiation ceremonies are 
wont in the ceremony called ‘the seating’ to make the candi- 
dates sit down and to dance round them. It is to this ceremonial 
that Plato? alludes in the Huthydemus. ‘You don’t see, Kleinias, 
that the two strangers are doing what the officials in the rites of 
the Korybantes are wont to do, when they perform the ceremony of 
“seating” for the man who is about to be initiated.’ Kleinias is 
undergoing instruction like the neophyte in the mysteries ; he has 
to sit in silence while his instructors dance argumentatively round 
him, uttering what seem to him unmeaning words. 

So far Strepsiades is a mystic in the first stage of initiation, 
Le. he is being prepared and purified. All this ceremonial is pre- 
liminary to the next stage, that of full vision (évro7ve/a). He is 
seated on the stool, he is covered with chalk, to one end only, 
and that is that he may behold clearly, may hold communion with, 
the heavenly gods. Sokrates in regular ritual fashion, first pro- 
claims the sacred silence, then makes preliminary prayer to 
the sophistic quasi-Orphic divinities of Atmosphere and Ether’, 
and finally invokes the Holy Clouds in pseudo-solemn ritual 
fashion : 


‘Sok. Silence the aged man must keep, until our prayer be ended. 
OQ Atmosphere unlimited, who keepst our earth suspended, 
Bright Ether and ye Holy Clouds, who send the storm and thunder, 
Arise, appear above his head, a Thinker waits in wonder. 


Str. Wait, please, I must put on some things before the rain has drowned me, 
I left at home my leather cap and macintosh, confound me. 


Sok. Come, O come! Bring to this man full revelation. 
Come, O come! Whether aloft ye hold your station 
-On Olympus’ holy summits, smitten of storm and snow, 
Or in the Father’s gardens, Okeanos, down below, 
Ye weave your sacred dance, or ye draw with your pitchers gold 
Draughts from the fount of Nile, or if perchance ye hold 
Maiotis mere in ward, or the steep Mimantian height, 
Snow-capped, hearken, we pray, vouchsafe to accept our rite 
And in our holy meed of sacrifice take delight.’ 


1 Dio Chrysost. Or. xm. 387 eilwSacw év Te Kadouuévy Opovicua Kabicavres Tods 
Evoumevous of TedovvTEs KUKNW TEpLyopeveLy. 
2 Plat. Euthyd. 277 v. 

* Aether, air and whirlwind frequently appear in the Orphic fragments 
preserved to us, e.g. Damase. Quaest. de primis princ. p. 147 kal yap “Opdeds: 
éreata & érevée wéyas Xpdvos aifépe diw 

@eov apytpeor, 


516 Orphic Mysteries [CH. 


The address is after the regular ritual pattern, which mentions, 
for safety’s sake, any and every place where the divine beings are 
likely to wander. That such an invocation formed part of Orphic 
Dionysiae rites is not only a priori probable but certain from the 
Tacchos song in the Frogs (p. 541). In a word the ‘full revelation, 
the évro7reia, of these and all mysteries, was only an intensification, 
a mysticizing, of the old Epiphany rites—the ‘Appear, appear’ of 
the Bacchants, the ‘summoning’ of the Bull-god by the women of 
Elis (p. 438). It was this Epiphany, outward and inward, that 
was the goal of all purification, of all consecration, not the 
enunciation or elucidation of arcane dogma, but the revelation, 
the fruition, of the god himself. To what extent these Epiphanies 
were actualized by pantomimic performances we do not know; 
that some form of mimetic representation was enacted seems 
probable from the scene that follows the Epiphany of the Clouds, 
when Strepsiades confused and amazed gropes in bewilderment, 
and bit by bit attains clear vision of the goddesses. 

That the new divinities are goddesses is as near as Aristophanes 
dare go to a skit on Eleusinian rites; that they are goddesses of 
the powers of the air, not dread underworld divinities, saves him 
from all scandal as regards his Established Church. He guards 
himself still further by making his Clouds, in one of their lovely 
little songs, chant the piety of Athens, home of the mysteries. 


The Clouds themselves were as safe as they were poetical. — 


Kven the Orphics did not actually worship clouds ; but their theo- 
gony, their cosmogony, is, as will later (Chap. X11.) be seen, full of 
vague nature-impersonations, of air and ether and Erebos and 
Chaos, and the whirlpool of things unborn. No happier incar- 
nation of all this, this and the vague confused cosmical philosophy 
it embodied, than the shifting wonder of mists and clouds. 

The scene, though it goes on far too long, must have been 
exquisitely comic. With no stage directions probably half the 


trivial and absurd details have been lost, but we can imagine — 


that the whole hocus-pocus of an Orphic mystery was carefully 


and in the fragment of a hymn to the Sun preserved by Macrobius Sat. 1. 23. 22, 


Solem esse omnia et Orpheus testatur his versibus : 
Kéx\vOe TyAeTrbpou Slyyns ENkavyéa KUKNoV 
ovpaviats orpopddyy&e meplipomoy alév éNocwv 
dyhaé Zed Acévuce, marep mévrov, warep atns, 
"Hye maryyevérwp mavalo\e xpuccopeyyés, 
words which might have been sung by Sokrates in his basket. 


ti er 


> 





x] Degradation of Orphism 5 


mimicked. We can even imagine that Sokrates was dressed 
up as an initiating Silen, such a one as is depicted in the relief 
in fig. 149. 


We can also imagine that in Athens it was hard to be an 
Orphic, a dissenter, a prig, a man overmuch concerned about his 
own soul. We have seen how against such eccentrics the advo- 
cate Demosthenes could appeal to the prejudices of a jury. 
We know that to Theophrastos* it was the characteristic of a 
‘superstitious man’ that he went every month to the priest of 
the Orphic mysteries to participate in these rites, and we gather 
dimly that he did not always find sympathy at home ; his wife was 
sometimes ‘too busy’ to go with him, and he had to take the 
nurse and children. . 

Plutarch®, sympathetic as he is to some aspects of Orphism, 
yet, in his protest against superstition, says, ‘these are the sort 
of things that make men atheists, the incantations, wavings 
and enchantments and magic, runnings round and tabourings, 
unclean purifications, filthy cleansings, barbarous and outrageous 
penances in sanctuaries, and bemirings. And again®, when he 
is describing the hapless plight of the man who thinks that 
affliction comes to him as a punishment for sin, ‘It is useless 
to speak to him, to tryand help him. He sits girt about with foul 
rags, and many a time he strips himself and rolls about naked in 
the mud; he accuses himself of sins of omission and commission, 
he has eaten something or drunk something or walked in some 
road the divinity forbade him.” This morbid habit of self- 
examination is a thoroughly Orphic trait. Pythagoras‘ advised 
his disciples to repeat these lines to themselves when they went 
home at night: 

‘What have I done amiss? what of right accomplished ? 

What that I ought to have done have I omitted to do ? 
‘When he is at his best,’ Plutarch goes on, ‘and has only a slight 
attack of superstition on him he will sit at home, becensed and 


1 Theoph. Char. xxvut. 

2 Plut. de Superstit. x11. rs decrdamovias epya Kal adn Katayéd\acra Kal 
phwara kal kwjwara Kal yonreia Kal waryetac kalrepOpoual Kal Tuumavicpuol Kal dxkdOapro 
mev Kabapuol, pumapai d€ dyveta, BdpBapor dé Kal wapdvomor mpds iepots KoNaguoi Kal 
TpoTNAGKLT Lol. 


® Plut. de Superstit. v1. 4 Diog. Laert. Vit. Pyth. x1x. 


518 Orphie Mysteries (cH. 


bespattered, with a parcel of old women round him, hanging all 
sorts of odds and ends on him as though, as~Bion says, he were 
‘a peg.’ Such rites as. those described by Plutarch were not late 
decadent inventions, though we hear of them mainly from late 
authors; they were primitive savageries revived with new spiritual 
meaning by the Orphics. Herakleitos’ refers to them: ‘ polluted 
they are purified with blood, as though if a man stepped into mud 
he should be purified by mud.’ 

This is the shady side of Orphism, the way it had of attaching 
to itself ancient, obscure and even degraded rites, the more obscure 
the easier to mysticize. It was this shady side that Plato hated, 
against which he protested. In the Republic? he says ‘seers 
and mendicant quacks besiege rich men’s doors, exhibiting books 
by Musaeus and Orpheus...... and in accordance with these they 
perform sacrifices, inducing not only individual persons but whole 
cities to believe that you can obtain freedom and purification from 

~— sins, while you are still alive, by sacrifices and performances that 
might please a child, and that there are things they call “rites,” 
which will release us from suffering after we are dead, and that 
if we do not perform them, then there are fearful things in store 
for us. The Orphics, alas, fell before the temptation, always 
assailing the theologist, to enforce his moral and religious precepts 
by the terrors of another world; there can be little doubt that 
the lower class of Orphic priest in some fashion sold indulgences. — 
The fearful things with which the uninitiated were threatened, will _ 
be discussed when we come to the question of Orphic eschatology. : 




















THE LIKNOPHORIA. 


The tearing of the bull is, however mysticized, a savage orgy ; 
the purification by mud and clay can never have been pleasing. It 
is a relief to turn to another Orphic ceremonial of more genial 
content—the Liknophoria, the carrying of the liknon. 

In discussing the worship of Dionysos Liknites at Delphi, a 
worship attended, it will be remembered, by a secret sacrifice per- 


ee eee 


1 Heracleit. frg. 130, Bywater, xa@alpovrac dé aluare prawduevor Womep dy el Tis 
és myddv EuBas myd@ atroviforro. 
* Plato, Rep. 364 Bs. 





fa The Liknophoria 519 


formed by priests who bore the specially Orphic name of Hosioi, 
Holy Ones, we have seen the /zknon in use as a cradle for the infant, 
god (p. 402). It will further be noted that Dionysos Liknites is, 
like the infant Ploutos in the cornucopia, only an anthropomorphic 
presentation of the new-born fruits of the earth, of the fruits 
whether of spring or autumn; he is a male form of Kore the 
earth-daughter. The ceremony of ‘waking’ him was primarily 
but a mimetic summons to the earth to bring forth her fruits 
in due season. 

On the relief in fig. 148 in the Glyptothek at Munich’ we 
see a shovel-shaped liknon, of a shape that might well serve 


wa 
i, 


“(Uf 


/ g 
(Se 
NCA 


aie 
moe 


Ulli 
PN 


4, 





Fic. 148. 


for a cradle; but it contains not a child, only grapes and leaves, 
and the phallic symbol of animal life. The relief, of Hellenistic 
date, represents a peasant going to market; he carries fruits 
and some animal slung on a stick over his shoulder, and he 
drives in front of him a cow with her calf tied on to her. He is 


' Munich Glyptothek, No. 601. Schreiber, Hell. Reliefbilder, Taf. 80 a. 


520 Orphie Mysteries (cH. 


passing a sanctuary of Dionysos; a wine cup and torches and a 
thyrsos are seen to the left. Up above is asecond little shrine with 
a Herm, whether of Hermes or Dionysos it is impossible to say. 
High in the middle of the main building is an elaborate erection, 
on the top of which is set up the sacred liknon. 

We are at once reminded of a fragment of Sophocles?: 


‘Go on your road, 
All ye the folk of handicraft who pray 
To Ergane, your bright-eyed child of Zeus, 
With service of your posted winnow-corbs.’ 


The passage is of interest because it shows that the liknon, the 
harvest basket, though undoubtedly used in the cult of Dionysos, 
was nowise confined to him. Athene Ergane, goddess at first no 
doubt of ‘works’ in the Hesiodic sense, of tilth® rather than of 





Fie. 149, 


weaving and handicraft, was, as has been previously shown (p. 301), 
only another Kore, the local Earth-daughter of Athens. To her 
rather than to the work-fellow of Hephaistos, the liknon full of 


1 Soph. frg. 724 orarors 
Mivoirt mpoorpémedbe. 

2 I have already discussed the liknon in connection with the fragment of 
Sophocles in the Classical Review, vol. v1. p. 270. In the Thorwaldsen collection 
at Copenhagen there is a relief closely analogous to that in fig. 148. A liknon 
is erected on a column: above it appears a large goat’s head, see Schreiber, Relief- 
bilder, Taf. cxr, 1. 





x] The Liknophoria 521 


fruits was a fit offering, and in solemn consecration it was set up, 
erected (ctarév), as on the relief. The word ‘erected’ is used no 
doubt to mark the contrast with other ceremonies of the carrying 
of the liknon (Liknophoria). 

This setting up of the liknon was too open and public a matter 
to be a mystery. It was a mere offering of first-fruits whether to 
Athene or Kore or Liknites. But in the service of Liknites there 
was an element of mystery, the birth of the divine child, and it is 
largely in connection with the cult of Dionysos that the liknon takes 
on mystic developments. It is an excellent instance of determined 
Orphic mysticizing. 

In the relief’ reproduced in fig. 149 we have what is manifestly 
a Dionysiac mystery. The neophyte is in the act of being 
veiled; he may not look at the liknon, with its fruit and sacred 
symbol, which will presently be placed upon his head. A satyr 
holds it in readiness, and behind the neophyte is a Maenad with 
her cymbal. 


The veiling of the head marks the mysterious character of the 
ceremony. We see it again in the delicate piece of stucco-work from 











Fie. 150. 


the Farnesina palace reproduced in fig. 150, and now in the Museo 


__ 7 Baumeister, Denkméler p. 449, fig. 496. Campana op. plast. 45. An almost 
identical relief on a ‘Campana’ terracotta is in the Kestner Museum at Hanover. 







522 Orphic Mysteries [cH. 


delle Therme at Rome’. The scene is clearly one of initiation; 
the thyrsos carried by the boy with head closely veiled marks it as 
a mystery of Dionysos. A priest is unveiling an object on what — 
seems to be an altar. Unfortunately the stucco is much damaged 
and what the object is cannot be certainly made out; it looks like © 
a liknon in shape. In any case the ceremony of veiling at a_ 
Dionysiac mystery is clear. Behind the officiating priestess is a 
cista, containing no doubt the further sacra of the nite. The 
scene takes place in a sanctuary, indicated by a column and a ~ 
sacred tree. 

The custom of veiling survives for us in the ritual veil of the ~ 
bride and the widow, but we have almost emptied it of its solemn 
ancient content. The bride veils herself, it is usually supposed, out 
of modesty. It is therefore with some surprise we learn that in the 
primitive church bridegroom as well as bride were veiled. This 
custom, according to the Abbé Duchesne’, obtained till quite re- — 
cently in France and still obtains in the Armenian Church. At 
the actual moment of the ceremony, apparently as an integral 
‘part of it, the priest spreads over bride and groom together a long 
red veil, the flammeum’ of the Romans. In the Coptic ritual the 
veil is white, but is spread alike over man and woman. 

The real symbolism of the veil, which indicates neither modesty 
nor chastity, comes out when we examine classical usage. The — 
question was raised long ago by Plutarch+ ‘Why do men veil their 
heads when they worship the gods and uncover them when they 
wish to do honour to men?’ Plutarch is better at asking questions 
than at answering them, but, among the various odd solutions he 
propounds, he gives one suggestive clue, viz. that the custom was 
analogous to those of the Pythagoreans. Pythagorean, as we have : 
seen, spells Orphic revival of primitive usage. f 

The real reason of the custom comes out in the ceremonial — 
known as the Sacred Spring (ver sacrum), which Festus’ de- 
scribes as follows: ‘The Sacred Spring was a rite of dedication 
among the Italians. Under the pressure of extreme disasters 


1 Helbig, Museo delle Therme, no, 1122. Fig. 150 is drawn from a photograph. 

* Since the above was written and the drawing in fig. 150 made, I have examined 
the original, and find that the obscure object is a liknon; the main outline and 
even the handle can be clearly made out. 

% Duchesne, Origines du culte chrétien p. 416. 

 PlntiQ). Hk. 5 Festus, p. 379. 


ee The Liknophoria 528 


they used to make a vow that they would sacrifice all animal 
things born to them in the spring next ensuing. But as it seemed 
to them a barbarous thing to slay innocent boys and girls, when 
they came to adult years they veiled them and drove them out 
beyond the boundaries of their state.’ Whether the horrid 
practice of the ‘Sacred Spring’ is real or imaginary, does not 
for our purpose greatly matter. One thing is clear: the practice 
of veiling symbolized, was the equivalent of, dedication. The 
bride and bridegroom alike are veiled because they are dedicated 
in the mystery of marriage, consecrated, made over to the powers 
of life. The penitent is veiled because he dedicates himself as 
atonement for sin; the widow is made over to the powers of death, 
primarily no doubt as a substitute for her sacrifice, her ‘devotio’ 
of herself to the ghost of her dead husband. Alcestist when she 
returns to the upper air is veiled and silent, and must so remain 
for the space of three days; she is consecrate to Hades: 

‘Thou mayst not hear sound of her spoken words 

Till she be disenhallowed from the gods 

Of the nether earth and see the third day’s light.’ 

The old meaning of devotion to the gods survives now-a-days 
only in the beautiful ceremonial of the Roman Church, known in 
popular parlance as ‘taking the veil, and even here its dread 
significance has been softened down by the symbolism of a mystic 
marriage ; the ‘devotio’ for life is blended with the ‘devotio’ for 
death’. 

In fig. 148 the luknon has been set up (crarov), on high, in 
open evidence; it contains simply an offering of first-fruits with 
the added symbol of whe phallos; it is sacred, but nowise myste- 
rious. It forms in this particular monument a part of the worship 
of Dionysos, but it might belong, as already noted, equally well 
to any and every god or goddess of harvest to whom first-fruits 
were due. In figs. 149 and 150 the léknon has become part of 
a mystery cult; it is about to be put on the head of the 
worshipper: he is veiled and may not look upon it. What are 
the elements of mystery and how were they imported ? 


1 Bur. Ale. 1144. The ritual word d¢ayvicnra, disenhallowed, marks the 
primitive meaning, getting rid of the pollution of the dead; it is a form of drortpor7. 

* For the whole subject see ‘ Le voile d’oblation,’ S. Reinach, Acad. des Inscrip- 
tions, C.R. 1897, p. 644. 


= ‘sis 
524 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


In discussing the religion of Dionysos it has been seen that, at_ 
Delphi, he was worshipped as Liknites. Hesychius? thus explains” 
the title: ‘ Liknites, a name of Dionysos, from the cradle in which 
they put children to sleep.’ The liknon, the shovel-shaped basket 
used for the carrying of fruits, served in primitive days another 
purpose, that of cradle for a child. 

On the vase-painting? in fig. 151, from a red-figured cylix in the 
Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, we see the wicker-work liknon in 





Fie. 151. 


use as acradle. The baby Hermes, wearing his broad petasos, sits 
up in his iknon looking at the oxen he has just stolen. One of them 
turns round surprised at the strange little object he sees, and 
gently snuffs the cradle. Maia, the mother of Hermes, comes up 
in consternation and holds out a protesting hand. It is the scene 
described in the Homeric hymn’, though, as usual, the vase-painter 
is independent in matters of detail : 


‘Straightway did goodly Hermes back to his cradle hie, 

And round his shoulders pulled the clothes, as when a babe doth lie — 
All snug and warm in swaddling bands, And—for he loved it well— 
Tight in his left hand held he his lyre of tortoise-shell.’ 


The Thyiades, as has been noted (p. 402), awakened the child 
Liknites. Of the actual ceremony of ‘awakening’ ancient art _ 
has left us no record; but on a sarcophagus in the Fitzwilliam 
Museum‘ at Cambridge (fig. 152) we have a scene depicted that 


1 Hesych. s.v. 2? Baumeister, Denkméiler vol. 1. p. 680, fig. 741. 

® Hom. Hymn. Mere. 150. 

* Cat. 31. Pashley, Travels in Crete, 1837, vol. 1. p. 37. A very similar — 
representation of Liknites carried by two Satyrs occurs on a sarcophagus in the — 
Naples Museum. Dr Hans Graeven kindly pointed out to me a majolica plate — 
in the Kestner Museum at Hanover on which oddly enough exactly the same scene — 
occurs. Clearly it is a copy from an ancient sarcophagus. The only addition — 
is that the group stands against the background of a mediaeval landscape. 


x] The Liknophoria 525 


looks like a reminiscence of some such ceremonial. On the front 
face of the sarcophagus is represented the triumphant procession 
of Bacchos; at one of the ends is the scene of the carrying of the 
infant god. The two men, one bearded, the other youthful, grasp 
the liknon by its convenient handles, and emerge hurriedly from 
behind a curtain slung between two trees. The curtain and the 
flaming torches point to a mystery scene enacted by night. 





Bie. 152: 


Nothing certain is known of the details of the ceremony, but 
it may be conjectured that at a given signal the birth of the 
sacred child was announced, and the attendants issued from 
behind a screen of some kind, bearing the child in a lzknon. 
The vase-painting in fig. 153 from a hydria in the Museum at 
Constantinople? offers a close analogy to Liknites, the child in the 
cradle, and throws instant light on his primitive significance. The 
vase is of somewhat late style, about the turn of the 5th and 4th 
centuries B.C., the drawing only indifferent, but the subject-matter 
all important. The scene is at Eleusis. Of that we are sure, 
because Triptolemos is present with his winged car and the corn- 
ears he is about to carry through the world. The side figures 
in the top row of vases of this class are always subordinate, usually 
difficult of interpretation. The figure in the left-hand corner is 
Aphrodite, by this time tediously omnipresent. The group to 
1§. Reinach, Revue Arch. 1900, vol. xxxvi. p. 87. The vase has been more 


fully interpreted by Dr Svoronos, Journal dArchéologie et Numismatique, 1901, 
p. 387. 


526 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


the right cannot certainly be named, but the seated woman is 
known to be a priestess from the great temple-key she holds over 
her right shoulder. On the lower row the interpretation of the 
central group is certain. Ge rises from the ground, watched by 


U7) 





Fie. 153. 


two goddesses; one to the right bears a gold lance; she is 
obviously Athene. The group to the left, of two women, one 
holding a torch, represents Kore and Demeter. 

The scene represented is clearly the birth of a divine child at 
Eleusis. The birth of such a child! was, as will later be seen 
(p. 552), proclaimed by the hierophant at some moment during 
the celebration of the Mysteries: ‘Brimo has borne a child 
Brimos,’ but such a mystery would scarcely be represented openly 
on a vase-painting. A simpler name lies to hand. The child rises 
out of a cornucopia, symbol of fertility. He is the fruits of the 
earth. He is solemnly presented to Athene because Eleusis gave 
to Athens her corn and her mysteries. Art could speak no 
plainer. On vases representing Eleusinian scenes, e.g. the sending 
forth of Triptolemos, Plouton, who is none other than Ploutos, 
Wealth, is represented as an aged man, white-haired, carrying 
a cornucopia full of fruits’; but here we have the young Ploutos, 
the babe who zs wealth itself. In like fashion the liknon is either 


' The birth of Brimos is discussed later (p. 549). 
* B. M. Cat. 2 183. Myth. and Mon. Ancient Athens, p. liii, fig. 9. 


~~ a 


x] The Liknophoria 527 


a basket for fruits or a cradle for a child. It is all the same 
beautiful symbolism that refuses coldly to discriminate between 
the human and the natural, that sees in marriage the plough, 
in man the sower, in earth the mother, and in the fruits of the 
earth the new-born child. 

When we realize that the liknon is, as it were, a cornucopia 
that for human fruit becomes a cradle, we naturally expect that, 
in its mystical sense, it will be a symbol of new birth, that Liknites 
will be connected with a doctrine of palingenesia, a sort of spiritual 
resurrection. The Orphics had their doctrine of palingenesia, but 
the symbolism of the /zknon was to them mainly of purification, 
to which they added that of rebirth. The history of how this 
came to be is a curious and instructive chapter in the development 
of primitive mysticism. 


The locus classicus on the liknon is the commentary of Servius 
on Vergil’s* words in the first Georgic, where among the stock 
implements of Demeter he notes the mystica vannus Lacchi. So 
confused and confusing is the commentary that it has gone far to 
make the iknon or vannus mysterious. 

Virgil first enumerates all the heavy agricultural implements : 
the ploughshare’s heavy strength, the slow rolling waggons, the 
irksome weight of the mattock, and next he notes 


‘Slight wares entwined of wicker work that Celeus made for man, 
Frames of arbutus wood compact, Iacchus’ mystic fan.’ 


If we were left with Virgil only we should conclude that the 
fan was a fan, ie. a thing with which to cause wind, to ventilate?, 


1 Verg. Georg. 1. 165 

Virgea praeterea Celei vilisque supellex, 

Arbuteae crates, et mystica vannus Jacchi. 
Serv. ad loc. Id est cribrum areale. Mystica autem Iacchi ideo ait quod Liberi 
Patris sacra ad purgationem animae pertinebant: et sic homines ejus Mysteriis 
purgabantur, sicut vannis frumenta purgantur. Hine est quod dicitur Osiridis 
membra a Typhone dilaniata Isis cribro superposuisse: nam idem est Liber Pater 
in cujus Mysteriis vannus est: quia ut diximus animas purgat. Unde et Liber ab 
eo quod liberet dictus, quem Orpheus a gigantibus dicit esse discerptum. Nonnulli 
Liberum Patrem apud Graecos Ackvirny dici adferunt; vannus autem apud eos 
Nivoy_nuncupatur; ubi deinde positus esse dicitur postquam est utero matris 
editus. Alii mysticam sic accipiunt ut vannum vas vimineum latum dicant, 
in quod ipsi propter capacitatem congerere rustici primitias frugum soleant et 
Libero et Liberae sacrum facere. Inde mystica, 

2 Mr Andrew Lang (Custom and Myth p. 36) conjectures that the ‘use of the 
mystica vannus Iacchi was a mode of raising a sacred wind analogous to that 
employed by whirlers of the tundun or bull-roarer’; but with his accustomed 
frankness Mr Lang owns that like Servius he is ‘only guessing.’ 


528 Orphie Mysteries [ CH. 
‘ 
and, as it was an instrument of Demeter, we should further 
suppose that this fan was used for ventilating, for winnowing her 
corn. We should still be left with two unanswered questions: 
(1) ‘why was a winnowing fan, a thing in constant use in every- — 
day life, “mystic” ?’ and (2) ‘how had the wimnowing fan of the 
corn-goddess become the characteristic implement of the wine- 
god?’ These two difficulties presented themselves to the mind of © 
Servius, and he attempts to answer them after his kind. He does 
not fairly face the problem, but he tells us everything he can 
remember that anybody has said about or around the matter. His 
confused statement is so instructive it must be quoted in full: 


me 


‘The mystic fan of Iacchus, that is the sieve (cribrum) of the 
threshing-floor. He calls it the mystic fan of Iacchus, because the 
rites of Father Liber had reference to the purification of the soul, 
and men were purified through his mysteries as grain is purified 
by fans. It is because of this that Isis is said to have placed the 
limbs of Osiris, when they had been torn to pieces by Typhon, 
on a sieve, for Father Liber is the same person, he in whose 
mysteries the fan plays a part, because as we said he purifies 
souls. Whence also he is called Liber, because he liberates, and 
it is he who, Orpheus said, was torn asunder by the Giants. 
Some add that Father Liber was called by the Greeks Liknites. 
Moreover the fan is called by them lzknon, in which he is said to 
have been placed directly after he was born from his mother’s 
womb. Others explain its being called ‘mystic’ by saying that 
the fan is a large wicker vessel in which peasants, because it is of 
large size, are wont to heap their first-fruits and consecrate it to 
Liber and Libera. Hence it is called “ mystic ”.’ 

If by ‘mystic’ is meant hopelessly and utterly unintelligible, — 
the fan of Iacchos certainly justifies its name. Servius leaves us 
with a ‘vannus’ that is at once a sieve, a winnowing fan and — 
a fruit basket, with mysterious contents that are at once a purified . 
soul, an infant and a dismembered Dionysos, leaves us also with 
no clue to any possible common factor that might explain all three 
uses and their symbolism. 

To solve the problems presented by Servius it is nécessary 
briefly to examine the evidence of classical authors as to the 
process of winnowing and the shape of winnowing fans’. So far 


' For the full discussion of this subject I may refer to a paper I hope shortly to 
publish in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1903. 4 


: 


ay The Liknophoria 529 


we have assumed that a winnowing fan is a basket, but when we 
turn to Homer we are confronted by an obvious difficulty. 

It happens by an odd chance that we know something of the 
shape of the instrument for winnowing used in Homeric days. 
It was a thing so shaped that by a casual observer it could be 
mistaken for an oar. Teiresias! in Hades foretells to Odysseus what 
shall befall him after the slaying of the suitors: he is to go his 
way carrying with him a shapen oar, until he comes to a land 
where men have no knowledge of sea-things, and a sign shall 
be given to him where he is to abide. ‘eiresias thus instructs 
him: 

‘This token manifest I give, another wayfarer 

Shall meet thee and shall say, on thy stout shoulder thou dost bear 


A winnowing fan, that day in earth plant theu thy shapen oar 
And to Poseidon sacrifice a bull, a ram, a boar,’ 


The word used is not liknon; it is @@npyAovycs, chaff-destroyer, 
but none the less it is clear that the ancient instrument of 
Winnowing was, roughly speaking, shaped like an oar?; confusion 
between the two was possible. Such an instrument might well 
be called a fan, and of some such shape must have been the 
primitive winnower. It is obviously quite a different thing from 
the liknon of the reliefs, the fruit basket. A thing shaped like 
an oar would not be easily carried on the head, nor would it 
suggest itself as a convenient cradle for a baby. 

_ The way in which this primitive winnowing fan was used is 
clear from another Homeric passage*. In the fray of battle the 
Achaeans are white with falling dust, just as 


‘When in the holy threshing floors away the wind doth bear 
The chaff, when men are winnowing. She of the golden hair 
Demeter with the rushing winds the husk from out the grain 
Divideth, and the chaff-heaps whiten and grow amain.’ 


1 Hom. Od. x1. 127 
ommére kev 6n Tor EvuBANuEvos GAdos dOirns 
Pin abynpndoryov éxew ava Padiuw wuw 
Kat ToTe On yaln mHias evjpes EpeTmov KTH. 
In the Odysseus Acanthoplex of Sophocles the winnowing fan was called by another 
of these descriptive epithets. Eustathius has preserved the line 
mors dOnpoBpwrov dpyavov Pépwr. 
That it was understood to be simply the rrvov is clear from Porphyry (De antr. 
nymph. 35)...ws mrvov nyeicbac elvac thy Kémnv. Eustathius (§ 1675) pertinently 
observes mAdTn yap Oahaccia TO éperpov Kai maTN xXEpoala TO TTVov. 
* Odysseus is figured on gems with a broad-bladed oar, see Inghirami, Galleria 
Omerica u., Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey, pl. 30. 
3 Hom. Il. v. 499. 


H. 34 





530 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


The wind is the natural winnower, but man can help the wind 
by exposing the mixed chaff and grain. This he throws up on — 
the winnowing fan against the wind, the wind blows away the 
chaff and the heavier grain falls to the ground. The best in- — 
strument with which to do this is naturally an oar-like pole, 
broadened at the end to serve as a shovel. Such an instrument 
was the mrvov or winnowing fan : 


‘As when from a broad winnowing fan, in a great threshing floor, 
The pulse and black-skinned beans leap out the whistling wind before 
Sped by the winnower’s swinging, so the bitter arrow flew 

From Menelaos glancing far nor pierced his corslet through!’ 


Here the joint work of the wind and the human winnower is 
clearly shown. 

A basket of the shape of an old-fashioned coal-scuttle could 
be used to scoop up the grain and toss it against the wind. It 
would not be so convenient as the oar-shaped winnowing fan, 
because the labourer would have to stoop to shovel up the grain, 
but it would hold more grain and would serve the second purpose 
of an ordinary basket and of a child’s cradle. Primitive man is 
not averse to these economies. 

The liknon and the vannus alike begin as winnowing fans and 
end as baskets for corn or fruit. The liknon of the Hellenistic 
reliefs and the vannus of Virgil are made of wicker-work; the 
fan of Homer shaped like an oar was made of sterner stuff, 
probably of wood. This may be gathered from a pathetic frag- 
ment of the Proteus of Aeschylus* where some one tells of 


‘The piteous dove who feeding beats and breaks 
Her hapless breast amid the winnowing fans,’ 


The winnowing fan is essentially and necessarily an instrument 
of Demeter. This Virgil knew, though he knew also that it had 
passed into the service of Iacchos. Theocritus® at the end of his 
harvest Idyll prays 


1 Hom. Jl. x1. 588 

ws 6? br’ ard mraréos mruddiv meydAnv kar’ addwHy 

Opwoxwow Kiapor medavdxpoes 7) épéBur Aor 

mvouy vd Avyupy Kal AcKUNTHpos epwp. 
2 Aesch. frg. 194, ap. Athen. 1x. § 394. 
3 Theoer. Id. vit. 155 

ds éml cwpe 
avdrs éyw maga méya mrvov. 
Cf. mhtas edijpes éperudv of the oar of Odysseus. The scholiast on “heocritus says 


€ ie | 4 


x] The Liknophoria 531 


‘O once again may it be mine to plant 
The great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands 
Smiling, with sheaves and poppies in her hands.’ 

The ‘great fan’ here, as the word wa£aups ‘fix’ or ‘plant’ 
shows, must have been the oar-shaped fan, not the basket. The 
basket, the light thing of osier carried on the head, is mainly 
characteristic of Dionysos, An epigram in the Anthology’ 
enumerates the various instruments of the worship of Bacchus, 
the rhombos, the fawn-skin, the cymbals, the thyrsos, and 


‘The timbrel lightly carried with its deep and muttering sound, 
The liknon often borne aloft on hair with fillet bound.’ 

We have then, it is clear, two implements in use in ancient 
days for winnowing; distinct in shape and made of different 
materials. The ‘chaff-consumer’ of Homer, called also a ptuon, 
made of wood and later of iron, is an oar-shaped implement with 
a long handle; the liknon proper, the vannus of Vergil, is a shovel- 
shaped basket made of wicker work. The only factor common to 
the two is that they are both winnowers. There the resemblance 
ends. The ptuon remained a simple agricultural tool, the leknon, 
the winnow-corb, became ‘mystic’ because of its function as a 
purifier and because of its second use as a cradle for the mystery- 
babe. In it was carried the phallos, the symbol of life; hence it 
was reverently veiled. The confusion between the two is entirely 
caused by our modern terminology, which uses the word ‘fan’ to 
translate both Xécvov, ‘ winnow-corb,’ and wtvov, ‘ winnow-fork’ or 
‘shovel.’ The religion of Dionysos, and with it the Orphic 
mysteries, adopted the liknon, the winnow-corb, and left the ptuon, 
the winnow-shovel, to Demeter. 


The diverse shapes of the liknon have been discussed at 
length because they are of vital importance for the understanding 
of Orphic mysteries and Orphic mysticism. The shift from 
winnowing fan to fruit basket marks the transition from agriculture 
to vine culture, from Demeter to Bacchus, and the connecting link 
is Bromios. The vine-growers have no use for the winnowing fork 


Gray O€ AcKKaYTaL Kal Gwpedwor Tov Tupdy KaTa péoov Tyyviovct TO Trvov Kal Thy 
Opwaxny xarébevto. For the modern representative of the @pivaé still used in Crete 
I may refer to my article in the Hellenic Journal, 1903, part 1. 

1 Anthol. Palat. v1. 165. 


34—2 


532 Orphic Mysteries [cH 






but they were once grain-growers, and they keep the liknon-basket— 
in their worship. 

Moreover, and this is the most curious and conclusive evidence, 
though they have tumed their winnowing fans into fruit-baskets, 
they by an instructive and half unconscious confusion take over 
from the winnowing fan its proper symbolism and apply it to the q 
fruit-basket. 

The winnowing fan symbolized purification ; as the husk is 
separated from the grain so is evil winnowed away from good; 
it mattered little whether the separation was effected by an actual 
fan (mrvov) or by a sieve (Kgoxuvov)'. Plato®, whose mind was— 
charged with Orphism, knew that all purification is discernment, 
separation, from the outward ¢leansing of the body to that inner- 
most purification which is ‘the ‘purging away by refutation of all” 
prejudice and vain conceit within the soul. We have kept among 
our sacraments the outward washing with water, but we have lost 
the lovely and more intimate symbolism of the liknon. Yet we 
still remember that ‘His fan is in his hand and he will throughly 
purge his floor.’ 

The symbolism of the basket of first-fruits was quite other; it 
was the sign of plenty, of new life, of the birth of fruits and 
children. - But the Orphic cannot forget purification; his fusion 
of new and old is at the back of all his confused mysticism that 
baffled Servius. The fan he knows symbolizes purification, but 
the basket is the cradle of the new-born Liknites. He sees in | 
a flash how he can connect the two. Was not the child torn — 
asunder? is it not that divine dismembered life by which all men 
are purged and consecrated and born anew? It even seems to 
him full of a wondrous significance that this divine dismembered 
life should be carried on the head, the seat of the divine reason, and 
he invents a story of a nymph, with an old Satyr name, Hippa’, 
who carried the liknon on her head and symbolized the soul. 
Charged with all this symbolism we cannot wonder that the /éknon 
as fan for winnowing, as sieve for sifting, as basket for first-fruits, 

1 qriov according to Vaniéek is from the root pu, meaning to cleanse, which 
in its various modifications gives us mip mvéw. Kxdoxwoy like xeoxloy is a reduplicated 
form of sak, ska, ski to separate. The symbolism of the sieve will be discussed 
later. In meaning it is identical with eribrum ; both are ‘ separators.’ 

2 Plat. Soph. 2268 wadoa 7 Toalrn dtdxptows...\éyeTat Tapa mavrwyv KaBapuds Tis. 


* Procl. in Plat. Tim. m. 124 c, p, and im. 208 p. According to Proclus p. 171 ¥F 
Orpheus wrote a discourse on Hippa. 


x] The Liknophoria 533 


as cradle for a child, was, as Harpocration? tells, ‘serviceable for 
every rite of initiation, for every sacrifice.’ 

The rite in which the lcknon was used, and that a rite of 
supreme importance for the understanding of Orphic mysteries, 
has been reserved to the end—the rite of marriage. 

On the engraved gem? in fig. 154, signed by the artist Tryphon, 
the scene represented is the marriage, or possibly the initiation 


TPYDAN 
€TTOIE! 





Fie. 154. 


and marriage ceremonies in one, of Eros and Psyche. The subject 
is of course mythological, but none the less is 1t a transcript of 
actual usage. Eros and Psyche, both closely veiled, are led by 
a sacred fillet in the hand of the Eros who bears the nuptial 
torch. Another Eros to the right unveils a seat or couch. 
Over the veiled heads of bride and groom a third Eros holds 
the liknon full of fruits. 


That the liknon was carried at marriage ceremonies is known 
also from literary sources. Plutarch* says it was the custom at 


1 Harpocrat. s.v. 76 Nikvov mpds macay TedeThy Kal Ovoiav émirHdecor. 

2 Miiller-Wieseler 11. 54. The gem was formerly in the Marlborough Coll. 
It is published in phototype and discussed by Dr Furtwangler, Ancient Gems, 
pl. nvm. ii. p. 339. It is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The antiquity 
of both the artist’s signature and the gem itself is accepted by Prof. Furtwingler, 
but has been questioned by many competent archaeologists. As I have not seen 
the original I am unable to express any certain conviction. For a full account of 
the controversy see Boston Museum Annual Report, xxtv., 1900, p. 88. 

3 Plutarch or the author of the ‘Proverbial sayings of Alexander’ (Prov. Alex. 
xvi. 1255), vouos jv “AOjvyoe ev Tots ydwous dupiOady malda Nikvov Bacrdgovra dprww 
wréwy eira émuréyew "Euyov kakdv evpov duevov. 


534 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


Athens at marriages that a boy both whose parents were alive 
should carry a liknon full of loaves and then pronounce the words | 


‘Bad have I fled, better have I found.” The fact that the boy 


Sp 


must have both parents alive, i.e. that he should be uncon- 


taminated by any contact however remote with the unlucky spirits 
and influences of the dead, shows clearly that here again the 


. 


carrying of the liknon was a fertility charm, a charm to induce ~ 


the birth of children and all natural wealth and increase. In 
a marriage rite the symbolism of Liknites, of fruit and child, 
could not be forgotten. The scholiast to Kallimachos? says ‘in 
old days they were wont to lull babies to sleep in likna as an 
omen for wealth and fruits,’ and Servius says, as already noted 
(p. 528), it was the custom to do this the moment the child was 
born. 

But the léknon in the marriage rite became not merely a 
fertility charm but the symbol of spiritual grace. This is clear 
from the words of Suidas®. The boy, he says, carried branches of 
acanthus and acorns as well as loaves. If Suidas is right, these 
ruder natural products were only present as being earlier first-fruits 
before man made loaves of corn, but Suidas says he carried them 
and pronounced the formulary signifying as in a riddle the change 
to what is better, for the wreath of oak and acanthus signified 
what was bad. It was this mysticizing of everyday things that 
irritated the plain man, that seemed to him at once foolish and 
pretentious; this it was that raised Demosthenes to his angry 
protest: ‘You bid your mystics,’ he says to Aeschines®, ‘ when 
you have daubed them with mud and purified them with clay, say 
“Bad have I fled, better have I found,” pluming yourself that 
no one has ever before uttered such words, you, he goes on, ‘who are 
kistophoros and liknophoros.’ Had not every plain man pronounced 
the words at his marriage and meant by them—increase of income 
and family ? 

The ‘ mystic fan of Iacchos’ was used in marriage rites. This 
brings us face to face with the question—did Orphie mysteries 


1 Schol. ad Call. Hymn. ad Jov. 48 év yap ? Nelxvows 7d adardy Karexolueov Ta Bpédyn 
mwodrov kal Kaprods olwrifduevor- Alkvov ody 7d KboKwov 7 Td Kobviovy ev @ Ta Tadla 
riéacw. For similar modern customs see Mannhardt, Mythologische, Forschungen, 
‘Kind und Korn,’ p. 366, 

2 Suidas s.v. Sburyor Kakév, evpov dmewov, and Hesych. s.v. 

3 Dem. de Cor. § 313. 


x The Sacred Marriage 535 


include a mystic marriage’? The Orphics worshipped, as has 
been seen (p. 499), both Mother and Son; they mysticized the 
birth of the Son; did they look back before the birth and mysticize 
the marriage of the Mother? On a priori grounds we should 
expect they did. A religion based on the belief of possible union 
with the divine had everything to gain from the symbolism of 
marriage. Happily we are not left to a@ priom speculation; we 
have positive evidence that Dionysiac mysteries contained a sacred 
marriage and that Orphics mysticized it. 


THE SACRED MARRIAGE. 


By a most unhappy chance our main evidence as to the Sacred 
Marriage of the mysteries comes to us from the Christian Fathers ; 
their prejudiced imaginations see in its beautiful symbolism only 
the record of unbridled license. We may and must discredit 
their unclean interpretations, but we have no ground for doubting 
the substantial accuracy of their statements as to ritual procedure. 
They were preaching to men who had been initiated in the very 
mysteries they describe, and any mis-statement as to ritual would 
have discredited their teaching. 

Clement? in his ‘ Exhortation’ wishes to prove the abominable 
wickedness of Zeus and says that he became the husband of his 
daughter in the form of a snake. He adds: ‘The token of the 
Sabazian mysteries is the snake through the bosom, and this snake 
gliding through the bosom of the initiated is the proof of the license 
of Zeus. Arnobius* too holds that the ceremony of the snake is 
but a witness against Zeus. He adds the important detail that 
the snake was of gold. It was let down into the bosom and taken 
away from below. The gold snake is in itself evidence of the 
simple symbolic innocence of the rite. 


1 Strictly speaking a iepa cvupuiis. These rites are probably of earlier origin 
than the patriarchal institution of monogamy. 

* Clem. Al. Protr. 16 LaBaslwy yodv uvornpiwy ciuBodrov Tots pvovuévors 6 Sud 
ké\mouv Geds. Opdxwy dé éoTiv ovTos dteAKduevos TOD KdAToU T&Y TEouMevev ~eyXOS 
dxparias Aids. The meaning of ia Kédrov and with it bd Kéd\rov is sufficiently 
evident from this passage. Any possible doubt is removed by the use of td Ké\zov 
in Lucian’s Alexander c. 39. 

3 Arnob. c, gent. v. c. 21, Ipsa novissime sacra et ritus initiationis ipsius 
quibus Sebadiis nomen est, testimonio esse potuerunt veritati, in quibus aureus 
coluber in sinum dimittitur consecratis et eximitur rursus ab inferioribus partibus. 


536 Orphic Mysteries | [ CH. 


The snake ceremony of Sabazios is of course the relic of a very 
primitive faith, of the time when the snake was the god. We are 
reminded of the story told of Philip of Macedon (p. 398) and his 
fear that Olympias was the bride of a divine snake. As civiliza- 
tion advanced the sacred marriage would take a purely human 
form. 

Clement! again gives invaluable evidence. Happily he has 
preserved for us the symbols or tokens of initiation into the 
mysteries of the Great Mother in her Asiatic form as Cybele. 
‘The symbols, he says, in his gross and ignorant blasphemy, 
‘will abundantly excite your laughter, though on account of the 
exposure you will not be in laughing condition: I have eaten from 
the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have carried the 
kernos, I have gone down into the bridal chamber. The first 
three tokens are, as has been already shown (p. 155), practically 
identical with the tokens of Eleusis and relate to the solemn 
partaking of first-fruits; the last is a manifest avowal of a Sacred 
Marriage. The word vac7os? here used means bridal chamber or 
bridal bed. It is roughly the equivalent of @aXapos, and like 
it had a hieratic as well as a secular use. The houses of the gods 
are built after the pattern of the dwellings of men. 

It is curious and interesting to find that a aortas, a bridal 
chamber, existed in the sanctuary of the Great Mother at Phlya. 
The anonymous author of the Philosophowmena? or ‘ Refutation of 

eo . . . 7 . 
all Heresies’ tells us the Bacchic rites of Orpheus ‘ were established 
and given to men at Phlya in Attica before the establishment of 
the Eleusinian rite of initiation. These rites were those of her 
called the Great One. At Phlya there was a bridal chamber 
(waotTds) and on the chamber were paintings, existing to the 

1 Clem. Al. Protr. 1. 15 ra otuBora Tis pujoews Tabrns...€k TYyumavou Eparyor, 
€x kuuBadov Ervov: éexepvopdpnoa: bd Tov macrov bréduy. Taira ody UBpis Ta cUuBora, 
ov xA\EVN TA MUTT HpLA ; 

2 The uses of the word zaords are discussed by Sir Richard Jebb in commenting 
on v. 1207 of the Antigone of Sophocles, App. p. 263, where the suggestion is made 
that the racrds was some interior portion or arrangement in the @d\apos. 

8 Philosophowmena ed. Cruice v. 3 reréNeora 5€ rabra (ra Baxxerd Tod ‘Opdéws)... 
mpo THs...€v’ EXevotve TedeTHs, eV Provovv Te THs *Arrixjs, po yap Trav “EXevowlwy 
pvoTnpiwy éoTl [ra] é€v TH PoLovvTL THs EY omevns I MeyaXns dpyra. €or. dé mracras év 
avrn, éml 6é THs macTaoos ey yeypamrat Mex pt oT LE pov n wavTwv TOY elpn weve dboyor 
idéa. mod\Aa pev ovv éoti Ta eri THs Tacrddos exelyns eyyeypauuéva’ mepl wy Kal 
Ti\ovrapxos movetrac -Adyous év rats mpds ’HumedoxNéa Séxa BiBos. Whether the 
macrds is here bridal chamber or bridal bed it is impossible to decide; it may 


have been a sort of decorative baldacchino. ‘That wacrés meant sometimes bed, 
not chamber, is clear I think from the title macro@épos applied to Aphrodite. 


x] The Sacred Marriage 537 


author's own time, representing the whole semblance of what 
has been described. On the subject of the many representations 
Plutarch wrote in his ten books against Empedokles. Unhappily 
the treatise by Plutarch is lost and the author of the Philo- 
sophouwmena only describes one painting, which will be discussed later 
(Chap. X11.) in relation to the theogony of Orpheus. At present 
it is important to note the one fact that in a primitive home of 
Orphism there was a sacred bridal chamber. In such a chamber 
must have been enacted a mimetic marriage. 

Nor was it only at Phlya that a marriage chamber existed and 
a marriage ceremonial was enacted. At Athens itself was such a 
chamber, and our evidence for its existence is no less an authority 
than Aristotle’. In his discussion of the official residences of the 
various archons he notes that in past days the King Archon used 
to live in a place called the Boukolion near to the Prytaneion, 
‘And the proof of this is that to this day the union and marriage 
of the wife of the King Archon with Dionysos takes place 
there.’ 

In a place called the ‘cattle shed’ the Queen Archon was 
married to Dionysos. The conjecture lies near to hand that in 
bygone days there was a marriage to a sacred bull. We are 
reminded that the worshipper of Sabazios was said to ‘herd’ the 
god (p. 420). Be that as it may, at the festival of the Anthesteria 
the Queen Archon was ‘ given in marriage’ to Dionysos, and from 
the author of the Speech against Neaira? we learn how dread and 
sacred was the rite. 

The mother of Neaira, a base-born alien, had on behalf of the 
city performed the ‘ unspeakable sacrifice’; she had seen what none 
but an Athenian woman might see; she had entered where none 
but the Queen Archon might enter; she had heard what none 
might hear; she had administered the oath to her celebrants, 
fourteen in number, one for each of the altars of Dionysos, ad- 
ministered it on the sacred baskets before they touched the holy 
things. The oath was written on a stone stele set up by the 

1 Arist. De Rep. Ath. 11. 5 (p. 118) ére cal viv yap ris Tod Baoikéws yuvackds 
oipmersis evTavda ylyverar Tw Avoviow Kal 6 yduos. Rutherford and Hude bracket 
kai 0 yduos. I see no reason for this. By Aristotle’s time the old matriarchal 
ovpmerés Was regarded as a regular patriarchal yduos. The double expression marks 
a transitional attitude of mind. 


* [Demosthenes] in Neaer. §73. ‘The sources for the ceremony in the Boukolion 
are fully given by Dr Martin Nilsson, Studia de Dionysiis Atticis p. 156. 


538 Orphic Mysteries [ OH. 


altar in the ancient sanctuary of Dionysos in the marshes, opened 
but once in the year at the festival of the marriage. It was set 
there in secret because it was too holy to be read by the many; 
the letters were dim with age; so the orator called for the sacred 
herald and bade him read it that the court might hear how ‘holy 
and pure and ancient were its prescriptions.’ 


The Oath of the Celebrants. 


a i ee ll Mk eS 


‘T fast? and am clean and abstinent from all things that make ~ 
unclean and from intercourse with man and I celebrate the — 
Theoinia and the Iobaccheia to Dionysos in accordance with 
ancestral usage and at the appointed times.’ 


Unhappily though we have the oath of purity we know 
nothing definite of either the Theoinia or the Iobaccheia?, Only — 
this much is certain, a sacred marriage was enacted by a woman 
high-born and blameless, and that marriage was a mystery. 


At Athens Dionysos is bridegroom, not new-born child. _ This 
is one of the shifts from Son to Father that constantly occur in 
Greek mythology. The Christian Fathers see in it evidence of 
incest, but the horrid supposition is wholly gratuitous. It has 
been shown in detail (p. 260) that the Mother and the Maid are 
two persons but one god, are but the young and the old form of 
a divinity always waxing and waning. It is the same with the” 
Father and the Son; he is one but he reflects two stages of the | 
same human life. We are perplexed because both Father and 
Son in the religion of Dionysos take on many names: Sabazios, — 
Dionysos, Bacchos, Iacchos, Zagreus. Each reflects some special © 
function, but each is apt to be both Father and Son. The Romans 
in their dull way, with little power for intense personification, 
leave the simple truth more manifest. Libera the Mother has 
a Son Liber, a child, but even with them the inevitable con- 
fusion arises, the child Liber grows up and becomes ‘Father — 
Liber,’ 

1 dyioretw Kat elut kadapa kal ayvn aad Te Tov d\Nwy TSv ob Kabapevdvrwr, Kai dm’ 
dvdpos cuvovclas. 


* The club rules of the Iobacchoi, noted p. 475, do not deal with the mysteries 
of the cult. 


iii i 


x] The Sacred Marriage 539 


Another bridal chamber in the cult of Dionysos remains to 
be noted, and one of special significance. On his way from Sekyon 
to Phlius Pausanias! came to a grove called Pyraea. In it there 
was a sanctuary of Demeter the Protectress and of Kore. ‘Here 
the men celebrate a festival by themselves, and they give up the 
place called the Bridal Chamber (Nuydova) to the women for 
their festival. Of the images of Dionysos and Demeter and 
Kore in the Bridal Chamber the faces only are visible. Here, as 
manifestly at Athens, the marriage service of Dionysos was 
accomplished by women; the men leave them alone with their 
god. If any one, Pentheus-like, charges these holy women with 
license, this plain primitive prescription refutes his impiety. 

From the evidence of Aristotle and Pausanias we may be sure 
that the marriage rites, so grossly libelled by Christian Fathers, 
were not the products of their own imaginations. Their wilful 
misunderstanding is an ugly chapter in the history of human 
passion and prejudice. Now and again, when they seek an 
illustration for their own mysteries, they confess that the pagan 
mysteries of marriage were believed by the celebrants to be 
spiritual. Epiphanios? says ‘some prepare a bridal chamber and 
perform a mystic rite accompanied by certain words used to the 
initiated, and they allege that it is a spiritual marriage’; and 
Firmicus’ by a happy chance records the social formularies. ‘ Not 
only words, he says, ‘but even nuptial rites occur in their sacred 
mysteries, and the proof of this is the greeting in which the mystae 
hail those just mitiated by the name of “ brides ”: 


“A light upon the shining sea— 
The Bridegroom and his Bride”, 


A mimetic marriage was, it is clear, an element in the rites of 
Dionysos and an element mysticized by the Orphics. Equally 
clear is it that in the ceremony of waking Liknites and in the 
story of Zagreus, we have as another element the birth of a child. 
At present we have no evidence of definite connection between 


SS Pestia live. 

2 Epiph. L. I. T. m1. p. 255, and Iren. 1. 18, p. 89, of wey vuudava catackevdfovce 
Kat puotaywylay emtreNodor per’ Emippnoewy TwWwv Tols TEeNoUMEeVaLs Kal TYEUVMATLKOY 
yapov packovoy eivat. . 

° Firmicus Mat. de Ev. Pr. Relig. p. 38 c neque verba solum sed etiam ritus 
nuptialis sacris mysticis intercurrisse indicio est solemnis gratulatio qua mystae 
recens initiatos sponsarum nomine consalutabant—xyaipe viudue, xalpe véov Pas. 


540 Orphic Mysteries [oH. 


the two. At Athens in the Boukolion we have a marriage rite 
but no birth rite, at Delphi in the waking of Liknites we have 


a*birth but no marriage. When the mysteries at Eleusis are 


examined we find, as will shortly be seen, that the two rites— 
the marriage and the birth—were in close and manifest con- 
nection. 


ORPHIC ELEMENTS IN ELEUSINIAN RITUAL. 


The question may fairly be asked—are we entitled to -use 
evidence drawn from Eleusinian mysteries to elucidate Orphic 
ceremonial ? or in other words have we any clear evidence that the 
worship of Dionysos in the form known as ‘Orphic’ came to 
Eleusis and modified the simple rites of the Mother and the 
Maid ? 

These simple rites have been already examined. It has been 
shown from the plain evidence of the Eleusinian ‘tokens’ that 


_the rites of Eleusis were primarily rites of a harvest festival, that 


the ceremonies consisted of elaborate purification and fasting, 
followed by the removal of the taboo on first-fruits, and the conse- 
quent partaking of the sacred kykeon and the handling of certain 
sacred objects. I have advisedly devoted no separate chapter 
to the Eleusinian Mysteries because all in them that was not 
a primitive harvest festival, all or nearly all their spiritual signi- 
ficance, was due to elements borrowed from the cult of Dionysos. 
We have now obtained some notion, fairly clear if fragmentary, of 
the contents of Orphic and Dionysiac rites; we have examined the 
Omophagia of Crete, the Liknophoria of Delphi and the Sacred 
Marriage of Athens and Phlya, and we are able to begin the 
enquiry as to whether and how far these rites are part of the ritual 
of Eleusis. 

Before attempting to answer this question it may be well to 
resume briefly the literary evidence for the affiliation of Dionysos 
to the Eleusmian goddesses. The actual fact of his presence 
at Eleusis must be established before we consider the extent 
and nature of his influence on Eleusinian rites. 


Xx] Lacchos at Eleusis 541 


a. JLacchos at Eleusis. 


Dionysos at Eleusis is known by the title of Iacchos. The 
locus classicus for Iacchos of the mysteries is of course the chorus 
of the Mystae in the Frogs of Aristophanes? : 


CHORUS (unseen). 
Tacchus, O lacchus! 
Iacchus, O Iacchus ! 


XANTHIAS. 
That’s it, sir. These are the Initiated 
Rejoicing somewhere here, just as he told us. 
Why, it’s the old lacchus hymn that used 
To warm the cockles of Diagoras ! 

Dionysus. 
Yes, it must be. However, we’d best sit 
Quite still and listen, till we’re sure of it. 


CHORUS. 

Thou that dwellest in the shadow 
Of great glory here beside us, 
Spirit, Spirit, we have hied us 

To thy dancing in the meadow! 
Come, Iacchus; let thy brow 
Toss its fruited myrtle bough; 

We are thine, O happy dancer; O our comrade, come and guide us! 

Let the mystic measure beat: 
Come in riot fiery fleet; 

Free and holy all before thee, 

While the Charites adore thee, 

And thy Mystae wait the music of thy feet ! 


XANTHIAS. 
O Virgin of Demeter, highly blest, 
What an entrancing smell of roasted pig ! 


DIonysus. 
Hush! hold your tongue! Perhaps they’ll give you some. 


CHORUS. 
Spirit, Spirit, lift the shaken 
Splendour of thy tossing torches! 
All the meadow flashes, scorches: 
Up, Iacchus, and awaken ! 
Come, thou star that bringest light 
To the darkness of our rite, 
Till thine old men dance as young men, dance with every thought 
forsaken 
Of the dulness and the fear 
Left by many a circling year: 
Let thy red light guide the dances 
Where thy banded youth advances 
To be joyous by the blossoms of the mere! 


The lovely hymn to Iacchos, as choragos of the mystae of 


1 Ar. Ran. 324. 


542 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. i 


Demeter, is speedily followed by a second hymn!’ to the goddess 
herself—the Fruit-bearer : | 


One hymn to the Maiden; now raise ye another 
To the Queen of the Fruits of the Earth. 

To Demeter the Corn-giver, Goddess and Mother, 
Make worship in musical mirth. 


The blend of the smell of roast pork and the odour of mystic 
torches, of buffoonery and ecstasy, is the perfect image of the 
fusion of old and new. 

In the ritual hymn of Delphi, already noted (p. 417), Dionysos, 
who in the procemium is addressed by his titles as god of a cereal 
drink, as Bromios and Braites, is when he leaves Parnassos and 
comes to Hleusis hailed by his new name Iacchos’ : 


‘With thy wine cup waving high, 

With thy maddening revelry, 
To Eleusis’ flowery vale 

Comest thou—Bacchos, Paean, hail! 
Thither thronging all the race 
Come, of Hellas, seeking grace 

Of thy nine-year revelation, 
And they called thee by thy name, 
Loved Jacchos, he who came 

To bring salvation, 
And disclose 
His sure haven from all mortal woes.’ 


Sophocles? in the Antigone invokes the god of many names for 
the cleansing of sin-stricken Thebes, but being an Athenian he 
remembers the god of the mysteries of Eleusis : 


‘Thou of the Many Names, delight and wonder 
Of the Theban bride, Child of the pealing thunder, 
Thou who dost rule over Italia’s pride 
And at Eleusis in Deo’s bosom wide 
Dwellest, Deo, she the mother of all, 
Bacchos, Bacchos, on thee we call.’ 


Bacchos at Thebes, but, when the poet remembers the noc- 


1 Ar. Ran. 382. 
2 The text as emended by Dr Weil runs as follows, see Bull. de Corr. Hell. xrx. 
[Olvoba]Xes 5é xeupt mad- 
Adv d[ér]as évOéas [ody olc-] 
Tpows €wodes wvxovs [’EXe]vu- 
civos av[Oenoel|decs 
Hvol & 1d Baxy’ o& i[é Macjav- 
[ZOvos &v0"] darav ‘EANAdos 
yas alup(t) élyvaérars [pldcov] ém[dr]ras 
épylwy da[lwy “Ta]x- 
xov [kAelec o]é Bporots mévwy 
wélas] & bp]uov [dédvmov]. 
8 Soph. Ant. 1115 rov raulay"Iaxyov. The title raulas points, I think, to the rites 
dispensed, ‘steward of the mysteries.’ 


x| Lacchos at Hleusis 543 


turnal rites of the mysteries, the name Iacchos comes irresistibly 
back : 
‘Thou who dost lead the choir 
Of stars aflame with fire, 
Of nightly voices King, 
Of Zeus offspring, 
Appear, O Lord, with thine attendant maids 
The Thyiades, 
Who mad and dancing through the long night chant 
Their hymn to thee, Iacchos, Celebrant.’ 

For Iacchos at the Eleusinian mysteries we are not left to 
the evidence of poetry alone. Herodotus? tells how, when Attica 
was being laid waste by Xerxes, Dicaeus, an exile, happened 
to be with Demaratus, a Lacedaemonian, in the Thriasian plain. 
They saw a great cloud of dust coming from Eleusis, so great 
that it seemed to be caused by thirty thousand men. They were 
wondering at the cloud, and they suddenly heard a sound, and 
the sound seemed to Dicaeus to be ‘the mystic lacchos.’ De- 
maratos did not know about the sacred rites at Eleusis, and 
he asked what it might be that they heard. Dicaeus, who took 
the sound to be of ill omen to the Persians, explained it as follows: 
‘The Athenians celebrate this festival every year to the Mother 
and the Maiden, and any Athenian or other Greek who wishes 
is initiated, and the sound that you hear is the ery “TIacchos,” 
which they raise at this feast.’ 

The account is interesting because it shows that ‘the Iacchos’ 
was a ritual cry, one easily recognizable by an Athenian, just 
as now-a-days we should recognize Alleluia or Hosanna. That 
the mysteries at Eleusis were still in the main of local import 
is clear from the fact that a Spartan did not recognise the 
cry. 

Iacchos gave his name to one of the days of the Eleusinian 
mysteries—the 20th of Boedromion (Sept., Oct.). On this day 
he was taken from his sanctuary in Athens, the Iaccheion, and 
escorted in solemn procession to Eleusis. Plutarch?, in comment- 
ing on lucky and unlucky days, says he is aware that unlucky 
things sometimes happen on lucky days: for the Athenians had 


1 Herod. vir. 65 kai of paiver Pat THY pov elvar Tov puoTiKov lakxov...Kal TH 
poviy Tis akoves €v Ta’ry TH Opty laxxafovcr. 

2 Plut. Cam. x1x. 15. The word used for the ceremony of escorting is variously 
ééayewv, mpoméurew, and once éfedavverv, see Foucart, Les Grands Myster és d’Eleusis, 
p. 121 (1900), and Roscher s.y. Iacchos. 


544 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


to receive a Macedonian garrison ‘even on the 20th of Boedro- 
mion, the day on which they lead forth the mystic Iacchos.’ 


Tacchos then was the name by which Dionysos was known at 
Eleusis, his mystery name par excellence for Athens. It is im- 
portant to note what special form of the god the name expressed. 

Strabo! says vaguely, ‘they call Dionysos, Iacchos, and the 
spirit (6aiuova) who is leader of the mysteries of Demeter’; but 
vagueness is pardonable in the particular connection in which 
he speaks, as he is concerned to show the general analogy of 
all orgiastic rites. Mythologists have too readily concluded 
that Iacchos is a vague title denoting a sort of ‘genius of the 
mysteries, and ‘the mystic Iacchos’ has come to mean anything 
and nothing in particular. 

But Suidas? is quite precise; he notes that Iacchos means 
‘a certain day, ‘a certain song, but he puts, first and foremost, 
what is the root idea of Jacchos, he is ‘Dionysos at the 
breast. Iacchos at Eleusis is not the beer-god, not the wine- 
god, but the son-god, ‘child of Semele, the wealth-giver*,’ the 
same as Liknites, ‘He of the cradle, whom, year by year on 
Parnassos, the Thyiades wakened to new life (p. 402). 

Jacchos had his sanctuary at Athens and was received as 
a guest at Eleusis. Never, so far as we know, had he temple 
precinct or shrine at Eleusis, and his name occurs very rarely 
in inscriptions. He is a god made by the Athenians in their 
own image; they were guests at Eleusis, so their god was a 
guest. He is as it were a reflection of the influence of Athens 
at Eleusis. 

Another point must be noted. Zagreus, it has been seen, is 
a god of ritual rather than poetry, Iacchos is of poetry rather 
than ritual, of poetry touched and deepened by mysticism. He 
is just so much of the religion of Dionysos as the imaginative 
Athenian can face. We never hear that Jacchos was a bull, there 
is no legend that he was torn to pieces. Sophocles‘, the most 

1 Strab. x. 3. 11 “Iaxxdév re kal Acévucoy kadodor Kal Tov dpxnyérny TOv mvornplww 
THs Anpntpos daluova. An inscription of Roman date has [dai]uove méupav ldxywr, 
see “Ep. ’Apx. 1899, p. 215. We are reminded of the Agathos Daimon, the spirit of 
wealth (p. 33). 

* Suidas s.v."Iaxyos. Lucret. rv. 1160 ‘tumida et mammosa Ceres est ipsa ab 


Taccho.’ ® Schol. ad Ar. Ran. 479 Dewedhu’"Laxxe wAovrodéra. 
4 Soph. frg. 782, ap. Strab. xv. p. 687, see p. 379. 


——~ 


x] : —Lacchos at Eleusis 545 


orthodox of poets, knows he has horns, but he sends his horned 
Iacchos to dwell in fabulous Nysa, 
‘Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird,’ 


and for the rest he is compact of torchlight and dancing. 

The learned Nonnus’, who is steeped in Orphism and a most 
careful ritualist, seems to hit the mark when he makes Iacchos 
the latest born of the divine Bacchic incarnations. According 
to Nonnus, Iacchos is the child of Aura by Bacchus, and is 
presented by his father to Athene, and Athene adopted him, and 
gave him the breast that before him none but Erechtheus had 
sucked. Here we have a manifest reminiscence of Iacchos as 
‘Dionysos at the breast. Nonnus goes on to say how the 
nymphs, the Bacchae of Eleusis, received the new-born child 
with dance and song, and they hymned first Zagreus son of Per- 
sephone, next Bromios son of Semele, and third in order Iacchos. 

So shadowy, so poetical are the associations that cluster 
round the name Iacchos, that, if Iacchos were our only evidence 
of Dionysos at Eleusis, I should be inclined to believe his in- 
fluence was in the main late and literary. It is to ritual we 
must look for evidence more substantial. 


It is perhaps worth noting that Pausanias*, in mentioning 
a trivial ritual taboo, notes that it is common to the mysteries 
of Eleusis and the teaching of Orpheus. He is speaking of the 
temple of the Bean-Man (Cyamites), but is uncertain of the origin 
of the name and cult, and knows he is treading on delicate 
ground, so he contents himself with saying darkly, ‘ Whoever 
has seen the rite at Eleusis, or has read what are called the 
sayings of Orpheus, knows what I mean.’ More than once, in 
examining a sanctuary of Demeter or Kore, he stops to note 
that local tradition attributed its foundation to Orpheus. Thus 
at Sparta® he saw a temple of Kore the Saviour, and ‘some 
say Orpheus the Thracian made it, but others Abaris who came 
+ Nonn. xiv. 951 ff. 
kai Tpirdtw véov tuvov éemecuapdynoav laxkxw 
kal xopov oyutéNecTov avekpovoayTo moNiTaL 
; Laypéa kvdatvovres dua Bpoulw cal ldkxw. 
That the child Iacchos at Eleusis became an element in Orphic teaching is evident 
from the degraded form of the Baubo legend expressed in an Orphie hymn and 


quoted in full by Clement, Protr. 21. 26, see Dindorf, vol. tv. p. 11. 
ie Wek. oe prin. als. 12 


H, 3D 


546 Orphic Mysteries | [ CH. 


from the Hyperboreans.’ Here the diverse tradition is unanimous 
as to Northern influence. The Lacedaemonians believed, he says, 
that Orpheus taught them to worship Demeter of the Under- 
world, but Pausanias himself thinks that they, like other people, 
got it from Hermione’, No great importance can be attached to 
these floating traditions, but they serve to show that popular 
belief connected the worship of the Mother and the Maid with 
Orpheus and the North. We are inclined to connect the rise 
of their worship exclusively with Eleusis, so that local tradition 
to the contrary is of some value. 

But the real substantial evidence as to the presence and 
influence of Orphic rites and conceptions at Eleusis is drawn 
from the Eleusinian ceremonial itself. Of the three main Orphic 
mysteries examined, the Omophagia, the Liknophoria, and the 
Sacred Marriage, two, the Liknophoria and the Sacred Marriage, 
are known with absolute certainty to have been practised at 
Eleusis. 

The first and perhaps the most profound and characteristic of - 
Orphic rites, the Omophagia, is wholly absent”. The reason is not 
far to seek. The Omophagia, deep though its spiritual meaning ~ 
was, is in its actual ritual savage and repulsive. We have seen 
a rite closely analogous practised by primitive nomadic Arabs. 
The cultus at Eleusis is, as has already been shown, based on 
agricultural conditions; the emergence of Eleusis was primarily 
due to the fertile Rarian corn plain. A god who comes to Eleusis, 
who is affiliated by this agricultural people, will shed the bar- 
barous side of his worship, and develope only that side of his 
nature and ritual that is consonant with civilized life. A god 
can only exist so long as he is the mirror of the people -who 
worship him. Accordingly we find, as might be expected, that it 
is the Dionysos of agriculture, and of those marriage rites that go 
with agriculture, who is worshipped at Eleusis, worshipped with 
the rites of the Liknophoria and of the Sacred Marriage. 


tb. IT. ao. 

2 The singular and very peculiar ritual of bull-sacrifice described in the Kritias 
of Plato, and represented on imperial coins of Ilium, has recently been elucidated 
by Dr von Fritze (‘Troja und Ilium,’ Beitriige, pp. 514, 563). It probably too 
place at Eleusis, cf. C.I.A. 11. 467, jpavro dé rots Muornplots rods Bots év ’HXevoive 
7TH Ovola. But this ceremony I believe to have been part of the primitive ritual 
of Poseidon at Eleusis, which, interesting though it is, does not here concern us. 
Of an Omophagia at Eleusis the ‘tokens’ contain no trace, though the bull- 
ritual of Poseidon may have facilitated the affiliation of Dionysos. 





x] The Liknophoria at Eleusis 547 


b. The LInknophoria at Eleusis. 


The Liknophoria as an element in the rites at Eleusis is clearly 
shown in the monument reproduced in figs. 155—157. The design 
forms the decoration of a cinerary 
urn? (fig. 155) found in a grave near a 
Columbarium on the Esquiline Hill. 
The scenes represented are clearly 
rites of initiation. In fig. 156 we see 
Demeter herself enthroned; about 
her is coiled her great snake 
caressed by the initiated mystic” 
To the left stands a female torch- 
bearer; she is probably Persephone. 
This scene represents the final stage 
of initiation (ézomreia), where the 
epoptes is admitted to the presence 
and converse of the goddesses. 

The remainder of the design (fig. 157) is occupied by two 





HiGs ba. 





Fie. 156. 


1 Helbig, Cat. 1168, Museo delle Terme, Rome, published and discussed by 
E. Caetani Lovatelli, Ant. Mon. illustr. p. 25 ff., tav. 1—1v. 

° The mystic initiated holds a club. He is probably Herakles, who, according 
to tradition, was initiated in the mysteries at Agrae. 


3D9—2 


548 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


preliminary ceremonies of purification, the sacrifice of the ‘mystic’ 
pig already discussed (p. 152) and the liknon ceremonial. It is 
on this last that. attention must be focussed. The candidate 


Va 
ENE wa ear 


ATS 
ge 





Fie. 157. 


is seated on a low seat (@povos); his right foot rests on a 
ram’s head which doubtless stands for the ‘fleece of purifi- 
cation’ (p. 24) * he is veiled and in his left hand carries a 
torch; above his head a priestess holds a liknon. It is remark- 
able that the /iknon in this representation, unlike those pre- 
viously discussed, contains no fruits. This can scarcely, I think, 
be accidental. When the artist wishes to show fruits in a sacred : 
vessel, he is quite able to do so, as is seen in the dish of poppy — 
heads held by the priest to the right, where perspective is violated _ 
to make the content clear. The absence of the fruits is best, I~ 
think, explained on the supposition that the liknon is by this time — 
mysticized. It is regarded as the winnowing fan, the ‘mystic fan 
of Iacchos, rather than as the basket of earth’s fruits. It is held — 
empty over the candidate’s head merely as a symbol of purifica- 
tion. ‘This explanation is the more probable, if the scene be, as is 
generally supposed, a representation of Eleusinian mysteries, but 
of Eleusinian mysteries held not at Eleusis but at Alexandria, 
The vertical corn-ears on the head of Demeter, the fringed gar- 












x] Sacred Marriage and Birth at Eleusis 549 


ment of the youth who handles the snake, and the scale pattern 
that decorates the cover of the urn itself (fig. 155), all find their 
closer analogies in Egyptian rather than indigenous Greek monu- 
ments. 


A Liknophoria, it is clear, was part of Eleusinian ritual. But 
the question naturally arises—did not Dionysos borrow the liknon 
from Demeter rather than Demeter from Dionysos? It is almost 
certain that he did not. Dionysos was worshipped as Liknites 
at Delphi before he came to Eleusis. Moreover, in the Eleusinian 
‘tokens’ the confession is not ‘I have carried the liknon, but 
‘T have carried the kernos. That Kernophoria and Liknophoria 
were analogous ceremonies, both being the carrying of first-fruits, 
is possible; that they were identical is improbable. Dionysos 
borrowed the liknon from his own mother, not from her of Eleusis. 

Far more complete and satisfactory 1s the evidence for the 
Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the holy child. These were 
as integral a part of the mysteries of Eleusis as of the rites of 
Sabazios and Dionysos. 


c. The Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth at Hleusis. 


Iacchos, we have seen, was defined as the child Dionysos ‘at 
the breast,’ but for any ceremony of his birth or awakening under 
the name of Iacchos we look in vain. Iacchos is Athenian; no 
one ventured to say he was born at Eleusis, but by a most fortu- 
nate chance the record is left us of another Mother and Son at 
Eleusis, and we know too that the marriage of this Mother and 
the birth of this Son were the central acts, the culmination, of the 
whole ritual of its mysteries. We owe this knowledge to the 
anonymous treatise which has already furnished the important 
details as to the Mysteries of Phlya. 

The author of the Philosophowmena* is concerned to prove that 

1 This passage is of such cardinal importance that the text is given below. The 
birth of Brimos and the ‘ear of grain reaped’ are often cited separately as elements 
in Eleusinian rites, but so far as I know their substantial identity has never been 
noted, nor has attention been called to the fact that they are both Dionysiac 
(Thraco-Phrygian) elements. The text is that of Cruice, Philosophowmena, Paris 
1860, p. 170. <Aéyoucr dé abrév, pyoi, Ppiyes Kal ‘xAoepdy aTaxuy TEAepicuévov’ Kal 


feTa Tovs Ppvyas ’AOnvatoe wvodvres ’EXevoivia, Kal émiderxvivTes Tols EmomTevouct TO 
Méya Kai Gavuacrov Kai TedeLdTaTov émomTiKOY Exel LvaTIplov, Ev cLwMTy TEHEpicuevoy 


Py. e+ 
7 ee We 


the heretical sect of the Naassenes got their doctrine from ‘cere- 
monials practised by the Phrygians. The Phrygians, the Naassene 
says, assert that god is ‘a fresh ear of grain reaped.’ He then goes 
on to make a statement to us of supreme importance. ‘ And follow- 
ing the Phrygians the Athenians, when they initiate at the Eleu- — 
sinian rites, exhibit to the epoptae the mighty and marvellous ; 
and most complete epoptic mystery, an ear of grain reaped in ~ 
silence. And this ear of grain the Athenians themselves hold to . 
be the great and perfect light that is from that which has no form, 

as the Hierophant himself, who is not like Attis, but who is made 
a eunuch by means of hemlock and has renounced all carnal gene- 
ration, he, by night at Eleusis, accomplishing by the light of a 
great flame the great and unutterable mysteries, says and cries in a 
loud voice “ Holy Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimos,” that is, 
the mighty has borne the mighty; and holy, he (i.e. the Naassene) 
says, 1s the generation that is spiritual, that is heavenly, that 
is from above, and mighty is he so engendered.’ 

The evidence of the writer of the Philosophowmena is indefea- 
sible, not indeed as to the mystical meaning either he or the 
Naassene he quotes attached to the rites, but as to the rites them- 
selves. He describes the rites only to discredit them and he 
quotes an actual ritual formulary. We may take it then as cer- 
tain that to the epoptae at Eleusis was shewn as the supreme ~ 
revelation a ‘fresh ear reaped’ and that by night there was — 
declared to these epoptae the birth of a sacred Child: ‘Unto usa ~ 
Child is born, unto us a Son is given.’ The close conjunction in j 
which the two rites are placed makes it highly probable, though ; 
not absolutely certain, that the one, the human birth, was but the 
anthropomorphic form of the other, that in fact we have here the 
drama of Liknites, child and fruit, reenacted; the thought is 
the same as that expressed by the vase-painter (fig. 153) where the 
new-born child rises out of the cornucopia of fruits. And last it is 
highly satisfactory to learn, and that from the mouth of a Christian 
writer, that the birth and the begetting were symbolical. The 


550 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


= pee 


ardxuv. ‘O dé ordxus ovrbs éore kal mapa AOnvalois 6 rapa Tod dxapaxrynplorou dworhp 
Tédevos péyas Kabamrep a’rds 6 lepopadvTns, ovK atroKeKoumevos mév, Ws 6“ ArTis, EvvoUXt- 
opuévos 5é did Kwvelov Kal macay mappnrnucvos Thy capKikhy yéveow vuKros év "ENevoive 
Umd ToAN@ mupi TeAXGY Ta peydda Kal dppyra pvoThpia Bog Kal Kéxpaye Néywr ‘lepdy 
éreke méTvia Kodpov Bpiud Bpiudr,’ rovréorw loxupa loxupdv. Ilérvia 6€ éort, dyoly, 
N Yéveots 1 mvevpaTiKh, H émoupdvios, ) dvw: loxupds dé €orw 6 obrw yervamevos. pyaly 
of course refers to the Naassene not the Hierophant. 





: it ae 
x] Sacred Marriage and Birth at Hleusis 551 


express statement that the Hierophant partook of some drug 
compelling abstinence cannot have been invented’, 

The author of the Philosophowmena says nothing of the Sacred 
Marriage, though from the birth of the holy Child it might be 
inferred. The confession ‘I have gone down into the bridal chamber’ 
is one of the ‘tokens’ of the mysteries of the Great Mother, but 
we cannot certainly say that it was a ‘token’ at Eleusis ; neither 
Clement nor Firmicus nor Arnobius includes it in his enumera- 
tion. We cannot therefore assert that each mystic at Eleusis 
went through a mimetic marriage, but we do know that the holy 
rite was enacted between the hierophant and the chief priestess of 
Demeter. Asterius’, speaking of the various procedures of initia- 
tion at Eleusis, asks—‘is there not there the descent into darkness 
and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of 
him alone and her alone ?’ 

Lucian® adds incidental testimony. In his account of the 
doings of the false prophet Alexander he describes how the im- 
postor instituted rites that were a close parody of those at Eleusis, 
and he narrates the details of the blasphemous travesty. Among 
the mimetic performances were not only the Epiphany and Birth 
of a god but the enactment of a Sacred Marriage. All pre- 
liminaries were gone through, and Lucian says that but for the 
abundance of lighted torches the marriage rite would actually 
have been consummated. The part of the hierophant was taken 
by the false prophet himself. A short time after the parody of the 
marriage ceremony he came in wearing the characteristic dress of 
the hierophant, and, amid a deep silence, announced in the usual 
loud voice ‘ Hail, Glykon,’ and ‘some fellows attending him, Paphla- 
gonians, wearing sandals and smelling of garlic and supposed to 
be Eumolpidae and Kerykes, cried in answer “ Hail, Alexander.”’ é 

Lucian’s account of this scurrilous travesty is not pleasant 
reading, but it serves one important end—it enables us to put 
together the two rites, the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the 


1 So determined are some commentators to see in pagan rites evil where no evil 
is, that Miller has substituted drnpricpuévos for rapyrnudvos, thus making nonsense 
of the passage. 

2 Aster. Encom. Mart. p. 113 B ovk éxe? karaBdovov 76 cKorewdy Kal al ceuval Tod 
iepopavrou mpds THY iepelav ouvruxtae pévou mpos ovnv; 

3 Luc. Alex. 38 ef dé uh modal joav ai dades Tay’ dv Te kal Tov uno kéNtrov 
émpaTTeTo. jeTa MLKpOV de wahw éonet lepopavTikas Ecxevacuévos ev TONAT TH clwr7 Kal 
auros uéev édeye meydAy TH pwv7 in DAUKwy k.T.d. 


ip 


7 


r 


7 


fe 552 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


holy Child; but for Lucian the sequence must have remained 
conjectural. We may now be certain that in silence, in darkness and 
in perfect chastity the Sacred Marriage was first enacted, and that 
immediately after the Hierophant came forth, and, standing in 
a blaze of torchlight, cried aloud that the supreme mystery was 
accomplished, ‘ Holy Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimos.’ 


The Sacred Marriage! formed part of the ritual of Eleusis, as 
it formed part of the Orphic mysteries of Sabazios and the Great 
Mother, but the further question arises—was this Sacred Marriage 
indigenous at Eleusis or did it, like the religion of Dionysos, come 
from the North? Was Brimo only a,title of the Eleusinian 
Demeter? This it would seem was the view of Clement* who 
is not strong in ethnography, but it can I think be shown that 
Clement was wrong. Brimo zs a form of the Great Mother who 
is also the Maid, but she is a Northern not an Eleusinian form. 
This is clearly evidenced by what we know of her apart from the 
mysteries. 


d. Thessalian influence at Eleusis. Brimo. 


S 

Of Brimos we know nothing save as the mystery child; he is 
the attributive son marking by identity of name the function of 
his mother. Brimo we know as an underworld goddess, and, 
a fact all important for the argument, she comes from Pherae in 
Thessaly. 

In the Alexandra of Lycophron Cassandra thus addresses her 
mother Hecuba*: 


‘Mother, unhappy mother, not untold 
Shall be thy fame, for Brimo, Perses’ maid, 
The Threefold One, shall for her ministrant 
Take thee, to fright men with dire sounds at night, 
Yea such as worship not with torchlit rites 
The images of her who Strymon holds, 
? Ta] AV] : ; ? 
Pherae’s dread goddess leaving unassoiled. 


For once Lycophron is intelligible; Hecuba is to be trans- 


1 The Christian fathers of course regarded the Sacred Marriage as a shameful 
rape. ‘Tertullian (ad nat. 1. 7, p. 57 p) asks ‘Cur rapitur sacerdos Cereris si non 
tale Ceres passa est?’ That Tertullian’s view is wrong is sufficiently evidenced 
by the author of the Philosophowmena, loc. cit. 

* Clem. Al, Protr. 1. 15 Anods 6 wuorhpia Kat Avds mpos unrépa Ajuntrpa adpodloror 
gum okal Kal wijvis...ris Anods ns 67 xdpw Bpyucd mporayopevdjvar Néyerat. 

8 Lyc. Al. 1176. 


Z x | | The Thessalian Brimo boa 


formed into a hound of the triple Hecate, Thessalian goddess of 
the underworld, and Brimo is but her other name: she is the 
Thessalian Kore. The mystic child at Eleusis was born of a 
maiden ; these ancients made for themselves the sacred dogma, 
‘A virgin shall conceive and bear a son.’ It was left to Christian 
fathers, blending the motherhood of Demeter with the virgin 
mother and the parentage of Zeus, things they did not and would 
not understand, to make of the sacred legend a story of vile human 
incest. — 

Brimo, though we find her, in late times, in the very heart of 
the mysteries, belongs with her hell-hounds to a couche of mytho- 
logy obviously primitive.. To the popular mind of the uninitiated 
she lapsed into mere bogeydom. Lucian? in his Oracle of the Dead 
brings her in with the rest of the comic horrors of Hades. When 
the underworld decree is passed the magistrates of Hades record 
their votes, the populace holds up its hands, ‘Brimo snorts approval, 
Cerberus yelps his aye.’ 

But Apollonius Rhodius?, writing of things Thessalian, and by 
natural temper inclined always to the serious and beautiful, knows 
of Brimo as terrible and magical, but yet as the Nursing Mother 
(Kourotrophos). When Medea is about to pluck the awful under- 
world root for the undoing of Jason, 

‘Seven times bathed she herself in living founts, 
Seven times called she on Brimo, she who haunts 
The night, the Nursing Mother. In black weed 
And murky gloom she dwells, Queen of the dead.’ 
And the scholiast commenting on the passage says she is Hecate, 
‘whom sorceresses were wont magically to induce (érdyeo@av); 
and they called her Brimo because of the terror and horror of 
her; and she sent against men the apparitions called Hekataia ; 
and she was wont to change her shape, hence they called her 
Empusa.’ He goes off into fruitless etymology but drops by the 
way a suggestion that may contain some truth, that the name 
Brimo is connected with éBpipyos ‘raging, the epithet of another 
Thracian, Ares. , 
Brimo then, some said, meant the Mighty, some the Angry 
1 Lue. Menippus 20 kai éveBpiujoaro 7 Bpiuw Kal brddxrnoev 6 KépBepos. The 
untranslatable play on the words shows that the name Brimo was taken to imply 


a loud angry noise. 
2 Apoll. Rhod. m1. 861, and schol. ad loc. 


554 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


One. The two, for minds obsessed by the atmosphere of ‘aversion, 
are not far apart: the Angry-Raging One is own sister to the 


Angry Demeter, Demeter Erinys. But by their Angry name it is 
not well to address the gods, lest by sympathetic magic you rouse. 


the very anger you seek to allay. Brimo may well have been one 
of the Silent Names. 

Brimo is Thessalian, and Thessalian often spells ‘later Thracian.’ 
Brimo is near akin to the Mother Kotys, the mystery goddess of the 
Thracians, but we cannot say that she is herself certainly Thracian. 
For definite evidence of a Thracian element at Eleusis we must 
look to its chief hereditary priesthood, the family from which the 
Hierophant was taken, the Eumolpidae. 


e. Thracian influence at Eleusis. Hwmolpos. 


The Eumolpidae must also be the keystone of any contention 
as to Thracian influence at Eleusis, and fortunately we are fairly 
well informed as to their provenance. 

Sophocles! in the Oedipus Coloneus makes the chorus sing : 


*O to be there 

Upon the sea shore, where, 

Ablaze with light, 

The Holy Ones for mortals their dread rite 
Nurse, and on mortal lips the golden key 
Is set of celebrant Eumolpidae.’ 


The scholiast* asks the very pertinent question— Why in 
the world have the Eumolpidae presidency over the rites, when 
they are foreigners?’ He proceeds as usual to make several 
puzzled and contradictory suggestions. Perhaps the reason is 
that it was Eumolpos, son of Deiope daughter of Triptolemos, who 


1 Soph. Oed. Col. 1048. I have translated «Ays by key not by seal, although, as 
Prof. Jebb (ad loc.) points out, ‘there is no evidence for the Eleusinian Hierophant 
putting a key to the lips of the initiated.’ In face of the fact that the key was the 
recognized symbol of priestly office, I incline’to think some such ceremony was 
enacted. We know from Hesychius (s.v.) that there was a festival or ceremony 
called ‘the festival of the keys,’ Epikleidia, but unhappily we have no details and 
peane use the fact as an argument. 

* Schol. ad Oed. Col. 1048 Gar etrat Tb djrore ol Eiwodmidac rev TENET WV é&dpxouee 
Edvor bvres; elrror 8 dv tus bre aktovor ™pwrov Tov EB bod mov Toijoa tov Anidmns Tis 
Tpurrod€éuou Ta év “ENevoive pvorhpia Kal ov Tov Opgxa Kal TovTo ioropeiy “lorpov év 
Tw Tepl Tuy ’ArdKTwv. ’Axealdwpos dé meumrov amd Tov mpwrou Hiddrovu elvac Tov Tas 
reheras karadelfarra, ypdpuy obrws Karoixijoa dé thy ’EXevotva loropovor mpOrov Mev 
Tous avrox Dovas elra Opaxas rods mera EvudXrou maparyevouevous mpos BonGelay els Tov 
kar’? pexdews mohepov, twes dé pact Kal Tov Eduo\rov evpety THY Minow THY TUVTEdOU- 
Mévny Kar’ eviauroy év ’EXevotve Ajunrpe kal Kopp.’ 


| 
| 
J 


a Humolpos at Hleusis 5p 
first instituted the mysteries at Eleusis, and not the Thracian, 
and this was the view taken by Istros in his book on ‘Things out 
of Order, or perhaps Akesidorus was right; his theory was that 
the Eumolpos who founded the rites was fifth in descent from the 
first Eumolpos. 

Unpleasant facts are always apt to be classed as ‘Things out of 
Order.’ Facts are facts, but Order is what you happen to like 
yourself. The simple fact cheerfully accepted at Eleusis was that 
the Eumolpidae were Thracians, but the Athenians did not like 
the Thracians, so when they came to Eleusis they proceeded to 
get the unpalatable fact into ‘order.’ One of two things must be 
done, either the Eumolpidae, whose respectability was above im- 
peachment, must be provided with a new and local parentage, they 
must be affiliated to Triptolemos, or the old parentage must be 
removed to a safe and decorous antiquity. Few people feel very 
acutely about what happened five generations ago. 

But all the time historians knew perfectly well what really had 
happened, and Akesidorus proceeds to state it quite simply: 
‘Tradition says that Eleusis was first inhabited by an auto- 
chthonous population, and then by those Thracians who came 
with Eumolpos to help in the war against Erechtheus.’ He lets 
out at last what was at the bottom of the whole complication, 
a fight between Eleusis and Athens and a contingent of Thracian 
auxiliaries. The war had been internecine, for the legend says the 
single combat between Erechtheus and Eumolpos ended in the 
death of both. Athens ultimately emerged to political supremacy, 
but Eleusis, to which Eumolpos first brought his rites, maintained 
her religious hegemony. Athens did what she could. She even 
built herself an Eleusinion and instituted Lesser Mysteries; there 
was much to-ing and fro-ing of sacred objects, the fepa are 
brought from Eleusis and Iacchos makes a return visit, but the 
actual final initiation takes place at Eleusis and the chief 
celebrant is still to all time a Thracian Eumolpid’. 

Art is not without its evidence as to Eumolpos at Eleusis. 
The simple vase-painter is untroubled by the Eleusinian blend of 


1T have elsewhere (Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. lvii ff.) discussed the 
relations of Erechtheus and Eumolpos. The view there expressed as to the 
Eumolpidae and their relation to Thrace and the incoming of Dionysos is confirmed 
by the more detailed and independent examination of the legend by Dr Toepffer, 
Attische Genealogie, p. 40. ‘ 


556 Orphic Mysteries [CH 


Dionysos and Demeter, and the Thracian origin of Eumolpos. On 
the kotyle in fig. 158, signed by the potter Hieron, and now in 
the British Museum}, he has brought together in friendly comrade- 
ship a group of Eleusinian personages, some of the ancient local 
stock, some of the northern immigrants. All the figures are 
carefully inscribed, so that there is no question of doubtful inter- 
pretation. On the obverse, and plainly occupying the central 
important place, the young local hero Triptolemos starts in his 
winged chariot to carry his ears of corn to the world. Demeter 





























Fig. 158, i 


in her splendid robe stands behind him, and ‘ Pherophatta’ pours | 
out the farewell cup. ‘Triptolemos was, as has already been) 
noted (p. 273), originally a local king; it may be he became 
young out of complimentary rivalry with the child Iacchos. 
Behind ‘ Pherophatta’ stands a nymph whom, but for the crip, 
we should not have dared to name, ‘ Eleusis.’ Beneath one handle, 
looking back at the group of local divinities, is the seate p 
Eumolpos, and near him is a great swan—for Eumolpos is the- 


| 


; 


= 


1 Cat. 61, 140; Wiener Vorlegebliitter A. 7. 


x] Dionysos at Hleusis and Agrae 557 


sweet singer. He is the Thracian warrior when he fights Erech- 
theus, but here he holds the sceptre as priestly king; he is, Thracian- 
fashion, compounded of Ares and Orpheus. The centre of this 
reverse picture is occupied by the Thracian Dionysos, with his 
great vine branch, and behind him comes his father Zeus, with 
thunderbolt and sceptre. Dionysos a full-grown man, not babe, 
balances Triptolemos. Eumolpos is vis @ vis to Poseidon, with 
whom he had close relations. Amphitrite completes the picture, 
a veritable little manual of the mythology of Eleusis. 


f. The Delphic Dionysos at Eleusis and Agrae. 


Another class of vase-paintings, in date nearly a century later 
than that of Hieron, bring before us Dionysos at Eleusis, but 
they depict him as an incomer, not from Thrace, but from the 
half-way station of Delphi. A polychrome vase of the 4th cen- 


N . 
Ne 
\ 
\ 


aS 


a 








aS 





Fie. 159. 


tury B.c., formerly in the Tyskiewicky Collection’ (fig. 159), puts the 
matter very clearly. The central figure is Demeter, crowned and 
sceptred, sitting on an altar-like throne. To the right is Kore with 
her torches. She turns towards Dionysos. He too is seated, as 
becomes a god, and he holds his thyrsos. He is seated, but on 
what a throne! He is seated on the omphalos. To the ancient 
mind no symbolism could speak more clearly; Dionysos is 


' For polychrome fac-simile see Coll. Tyskiewicky, Pl. x. The vase is now in the 
Museum at Lyons. 


558 Orphic Mysteries [cH. 


accepted at Eleusis; he has come from Delphi and brought his: 
omphalos with him. We are apt to regard the omphalos as 
exclusively the property of Apollo, and it comes as something 
of a shock to see Dionysos seated quietly upon it. We have 
already (p. 320) seen that Apollo took it from Ge, took the 
ancient symbol of Mother Earth and made it his oracular throne ; _ 
but at Delphi men knew that it had another and earlier content. 
It was the tomb of the dismembered Dionysos. The tradition 
that Dionysos was buried at Delphi is recorded again and again 
by lexicographers, Christian Fathers, and Byzantine historians ; 
but the common source of their information seems to be the 
Atthis of Philochoros (8rd cent. B.c.). Cedrenus', in his history 
of the whole world, tells the story of how Dionysos was chased 
from Boeotia, and ended his days at Delphi, ‘and the remains of 
him are buried there in a coffin (€v cop#). And his gear is hung 
up in the sanctuary, as the learned Demarchus says in his history 
of him. And the learned Philochoros gives the same account 
in his exposition about Dionysos himself; his tomb is to be seen 
near the gold Apollo. It may be conjectured that there is a sort 
of basis on which he writes “Here lies the dead Dionysos the 
son of Semele”’ We need not attach serious importance to what 
is ‘conjectured,’ as the conjecture seems to be rather of Cedrenus | 
than Philochoros, but 1t is clear that Philochoros recorded a tra-_ 
dition that the tomb of Dionysos was at Delphi. Tatian? identifies — 
the tomb of Dionysos with the omphalos. 


beciaasienesioan 


The vase in fig. 159 does not stand alone. The Ninnion pinax®, 
though details in its interpretation remain obscure, is clear on this | 
one point—the mfluence of Delphi on the Mysteries. 

In the discussion of this difficult and important monument 
I shall confine myself to such points as seem to me certain and 
immediately relevant. The inscription at the base tells us that_ 
it was dedicated by a woman ‘ Ninnion’ to the ‘'T wo Goddesses.’ 
The main field of the pinax is occupied by two scenes, occupying i 

1 Cedrenus Comp. 7’. 1. p. 24. The sources are fully given in Lobeck’s 
Aglaophamus, p. 572. The word Bdpoy is sometimes written Bd@pov, a detail which ; 
does not affect the present argument. 

2 Tatian c. Gr. vit. 251 év 7r@ reudver ro Anrotdov xadetral ris dudadds, 6 sa 
dupadros ramos Tod Acoviicov. 


% Rev. Internat. @Archéologie et Numismatique 1901, pl. 1. and Dr svoronosill 
interpretation, p. 234. a 





x] The Greater and Lesser Mysteries 559 


the upper and lower halves, and divided, according to the familiar 
convention of the vase-painter, into two parts by an irregular 
white line, indicating the ground on which the figures in the 
upper part stand. In each of these two parts some of the figures, 
distinguished by their larger size, are divine, e.g. the seated 
goddesses to the right; others, of smaller stature, are human. 
Among the human figures in both the upper and lower row one 





20S Dace sr a a ame 8 te ee Lah | am Lao 


Sie (SEES wie wel CIS Sierey 
ss ae si 


ae 


S 





is marked out by the fact that she carries on her head a kernos 
(see p. 159). She is a dancing Kernophoros*. She is the principal 
figure among the worshippers, and she can scarcely be other than 
Ninnion?®, who dedicated the pinax. In a word, Ninnion, in her 
votive offering, dedicates the representation of one, and certainly 
an important, element in her own initiation, her Kernophoria. 

? Poll. Onom. 1v. 103 7d yap Kepvoddpov Spxnua, oda dre Nixva 7} Ecxaptdas Epepov. 
képva O€ Taita éxadetro. 

* Dr Svoronos identifies ‘Ninnion,’ and I believe correctly, with the hetaira 


- Nannion, whose notorious career is related by Athenaeus (Bk. xm. §§ 582 and 587), 
but this question is for my purpose irrelevant. 


560 Orphic Mysteries (cH. 


Of this initiation why does she give a twofold representation ? 
The answer, once suggested, is simple and convincing. Each and 
every candidate was twice initiated, once in the spring, at Agrae, 
in the Lesser Mysteries; once in the autumn, at Eleusis, in the 
Greater Mysteries. The scene in the lower half is the initiation 
at Agrae, that in the upper half the initiation at Eleusis. It 
is the scene in the lower half that specially concerns us. 

The two seated goddesses to the right are clearly the ‘Two 
Goddesses, and the lower one is, it is equally evident, the 
younger, Kore. She is seated in somewhat curious fashion on the 
ground ; near her is an empty throne. Some interpreters have 
said that the vase-painter meant her to be seated on the throne, 
but by an oversight drew in her figure seated a little above it. 
But the artist’s intention is quite clear. Kore is seated on the 
ground, indicated by the curved white line beneath her. The 
empty throne is intentional and emphatic. Demeter, who should 
be seated on it, who in the upper tier is seated on a throne 


precisely identical, is absent. A vase-painter could not speak — 


more clearly. 


The explanation is again as simple as illuminating. The © 


4 


lower tier represents the initiation of Ninnion into the Lesser — 


Mysteries at Agrae. These were sacred to Persephone, not 


- 
‘ 
a 


Demeter. The scholiast! on the Plutus of Aristophanes says: ‘In ~ 
the course of the year two sets of mysteries are performied to — 
Demeter and Kore, the Lesser and the Greater...... the Greater — 


were of Demeter, the Lesser of Persephone her daughter. He 


further tells us that these Lesser Mysteries were a sort of pre-_ 


purification (7poxa@apaovs) for the Greater, and that they were 
founded later than the great Eleusinian Mysteries, tradition said, 
in order that Herakles might be initiated. To these statements 
Stephen’ of Byzantium adds an important fact: ‘the Lesser 


Mysteries performed at Agra or Agrae were, he says, ‘an imitation — 


of what happened about Dionysos.’ 
With these facts in our minds we are able to interpret the 


lower row of figures. Kore alone receives the mystic Ninnion, — 


and Dionysos himself acts as Dadouchos. That the figure holding 


1 Schol. Ar. Plut. 845. 


5 


* Steph. Byz. "“Aypa wal "Aypat xwplov mpd ris méodews, &v @ TA huKpa muoThpLa 


émtredetrat plunua TOv mept Tov Acévuaov. 


| 
: 


ah Delphic Influence at Hleusis 561 


the torches is a god is clear from his greater stature, and, if a 
god, he can be none other than Dionysos, who, as Iacchos, led the 
mystics in their dance. Dionysos has come from Delphi and 
brought his great white omphalos', his Delphic grave, with him. 
Below it are depicted two of the bundles of myrtle twigs, which 
are frequently the emblems of initiation, and which bore the name 
of ‘ Bacchoi”.’ 

This interpretation is confirmed when we turn to the upper 
tier. ‘Ninnion, having been initiated by Dionysos into the 
mysteries at Agrae, which he shared with Kore, now comes for the 
Greater Mysteries to Eleusis. Kore herself brings her mystic, and 
leads her into the presence of Demeter enthroned. The scene is 
the telesterion of Eleusis marked by two columns, which, be it 
noted, extend only half-way down the pinax. In the Lesser 
Mysteries, a later foundation, Dionysos shares the honours with 
Kore; in the Greater and earlier to the end he is only a visitant. 


The direct influence of Delphi on Eleusis as evidenced by these 
vases, and by many inscriptions, may have been comparatively 
late, but in a place to which Kumolpos had already brought the 
worship of Dionysos it would have easy access. At home Delphi 
became in the lapse of time more and more ‘all for Apollo, 
but abroad, as Athens, Eleusis, and Magnesia testify, she re- 
membered sometimes to promote the worship of a god greater 
than Apollo, a god who was before him, and who never ceased, 
even at Delphi, to be his paredros, Dionysos. 

Both on the kotylos of Hieron (fig. 158) and on the Tyskiewicky 
vase (fig. 159) Dionysos at Eleusis is represented as a full-grown 
man, not as a mystery babe. This fact is highly significant. 
The son has ceased to be a child, and growing to maturity forgets 
his relation to his mother. In the old Thracian religion, preserved 
in its primitive savagery in Asia Minor, the Mother, by whatever 
name she be called, whether Kotys or Kybele or Rhea or the 
Great Mother, is the dominant factor; the Son is, as is natural 


1 Dr Svoronos, whose brilliant interpretation of the pinax I follow in the main, 
sees in the ‘omphalos’ the wérpa dyé\acros. Here reluctantly I am obliged to 
differ. 

* Schol. ad Ar. Eq. 409, Baxxov éxddovy...rods KAddous ods of utcTat Pépover. The 
name given to these bunches of myrtle is evidence in itself of the intrusion 
of the worship of Dionysos. 


H. 36 





552 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


holy Child; but for Lucian the sequence must have remained 
conjectural. We may now be certain that in silence, in darkness and 
in perfect chastity the Sacred Marriage was first enacted, and that 
immediately after the Hierophant came forth, and, standing in 
a blaze of torchlight, cried aloud that the supreme mystery was 
accomplished, ‘ Holy Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimos.’ 


The Sacred Marriage! formed part of the ritual of Eleusis, as 
it formed part of the Orphic mysteries of Sabazios and the Great 
Mother, but the further question arises—was this Sacred Marriage 
indigenous at Eleusis or did it, like the religion of Dionysos, come 
from the North? Was Brimo only a,title of the Eleusinian 
Demeter? This it would seem was the view of Clement* who 
is not strong im ethnography, but it can I think be shown that 
Clement was wrong. Brimo zs a form of the Great Mother who 
is also the Maid, but she is a Northern not an Eleusinian form. 
This is clearly evidenced by what we know of her apart from the 
mysteries. 


d. Thessalian influence at Eleusis. Brimo. 


Of Brimos we know nothing save as the mystery child; he is 
the attributive son marking by identity of name the function of 
his mother. Brimo we know as an underworld goddess, and, 
a fact all important for the argument, she comes from Pherae in 
Thessaly. 

In the Alexandra of Lycophron Cassandra thus addresses her 
mother Hecuba’: 


‘Mother, unhappy mother, not untold 


Shall be thy fame, for Brimo, Perses’ maid, 

The Threefold One, shall for her ministrant 

Take thee, to fright men with dire sounds at night, 
Yea such as worship not with torchlit rites 

The images of her who Strymon holds, 

Pherae’s dread goddess leaving unassoiled.’ 


For once Lycophron is intelligible; Hecuba is to be trans- 


1 The Christian fathers of course regarded the Sacred Marriage as a shameful 
rape. ‘Tertullian (ad nat. u. 7, p. 57 p) asks ‘Cur rapitur sacerdos Cereris si non 
tale Ceres passa est?’ That Tertullian’s view is wrong is sufficiently evidenced 
by the author of the Philosophoumena, loc. cit. 

* Clem. Al. Protr. 1. 15 Anois 6é wuernpra kat Awds apos unrépa Ajunrpa ddpodloror 
cuumdoxal Kal ujvis...ris Anods ns 67 xdpw Bpyud mporaryopevOrjvac Néyerat. 

3 Lyc. Al. 1175. 


i i 


= 


Xx] The Thessalian Brimo 553 


formed into a hound of the triple Hecate, Thessalian goddess of 


the underworld, and Brimo is but her other name: she is the 
Thessalian Kore. The mystic child at Eleusis was born of a 
maiden; these ancients made for themselves the sacred dogma, 
‘A virgin shall conceive and bear a son.’ It was left to Christian 
fathers, blending the motherhood of Demeter with the virgin 
mother and the parentage of Zeus, things they did not and would 
not understand, to make of the sacred legend a story of vile human 
incest. — 

Brimo, though we find her, in late times, in the very heart of 
the mysteries, belongs with her hell-hounds to a couche of mytho- 
logy obviously primitive. To the popular mind of the uninitiated 
she lapsed into mere bogeydom. Lucian in his Oracle of the Dead 
brings her in with the rest of the comic horrors of Hades. When 
the underworld decree is passed the magistrates of Hades record 
their votes, the populace holds up its hands, ‘Brimo snorts approval, 
Cerberus yelps his aye.’ 

But Apollonius Rhodius?, writing of things Thessalian, and by 
natural temper inclined always to the serious and beautiful, knows 
of Brimo as terrible and magical, but yet as the Nursing Mother 
(Kourotrophos). When Medea is about to pluck the awful under- 
world root for the undoing of Jason, 

‘Seven times bathed she herself in living founts, 
Seven times called she on Brimo, she who haunts 
The night, the Nursing Mother. In black weed y 
And murky gloom she dwells, Queen of the dead.’ 
And the scholiast commenting on the passage says she is Hecate, 
‘whom sorceresses were wont magically to induce (érdyeoO@a); 
and they called her Brimo because of the terror and horror of 
her; and she sent against men the apparitions called Hekataia ; 
and she was wont to change her shape, hence they called her 
Empusa.’ He goes off into fruitless etymology but drops by the 
Way a suggestion that may contain some truth, that the name 
Brimo is connected with éBpiuos ‘raging, the epithet of another 
Thracian, Ares. : 
_ Brimo then, some said, meant the Mighty, some the Angry 
1 Lue. Menippus 20 cai éveBpiujoato 7 Borww xal brAdKTyoev 6 KépBepos. The 
untranslatable play on the words shows that the name Brimo was taken to imply 


a loud angry noise. 
2 Apoll. Rhod. m1, 861, and schol. ad loc. 


564 Orphic Mysteries [ce 


answered. He is the young male divinity of Eleusis, the nursling 
of the goddesses ; beyond that we cannot go. 


The rite of the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the Holy 
Child have been considered in detail because they were, I believe, 
the central mystery. As- 
terius’, in his ‘Encomium 
on the Blessed Martyrs’ 
already cited, protests 
against the Eleusinian 
Mysteries as the head 
and front of heathen 
idolatry and speaks of the 
Sacred Marriage as its 
crowning act. ‘Are not 
the Mysteries at Eleusis 
the chief act of your wor- 
ship and does not the 
Attic people and the 
whole land of Hellas as- 
semble that it may ac- 
complish a rite of folly ? . 
Is there not there per- ; 
formed the descent into — ° 4 
darkness, the venerated 
congress of the Hierophant with the priestess, of him alone with — 
her alone? Are not the torches extinguished and does not the 
vast and countless assemblage believe that in what zs done by the 
two in darkness is their salvation ?’ 

Making all allowance for the fact that Christian Fathers” 
naturally focus their attention on rites they chose to regard as_ 
immoral, it is yet abundantly clear that at Eleusis the Marriage — 
and the Birth were the culminating ritual acts, acts by which — 

union with the divine, the goal of all mystic ceremonial, was at— 
first held to be actually effected, later symbolized. Preceded by 













1S, Aster. Amasen. Hom. x. in SS. Martyr. ob cepaddXacov ris os Opnoxelas ra ev 
Brevotve pvorhpia Kai Ojos ’Arrikds kal H ENAds waoa cuvalpe va redéoy Matadryra; 
OvK éxel rd KaTaBdovov Td cKorewdr Kal ai ceuval Tod lepopdvrov mpods Thy lepelay ouvTuxlae — 
pbvou mpos wovnv; Odx al Nawrddes cBévvvvrae Kai 6 mods Kal dvaplOunros Simos Thy ~ 
cwrnplay abrav elva voulfover Ta vy TW oKdTY Tapa TGr dio mparromera ; 


x] Crete and the Mysteries 565 


‘rites of purification such as the Liknophoria, amplified, emphasized 
by endless subordinate scenes, reenacted in various mythological | 
forms, as e.g. in the rape of Persephone, they yet remained at - 
Eleusis, at Samothrace and elsewhere, the cardinal mysteries. 
Man makes the rites of the gods in the image of his human con- 
duct. The mysteries of these man-made gods are but the eternal 
mysteries of the life of man. The examination of endless various 
and shifting details would lead us no further. 

Before we leave the Sacred Marriage, an ethnographical point 
of some interest remains to be considered. 


g. Cretan influence on the mysteries at Eleusis. 


In Crete we found the Omophagia and the Mother, but no 
marriage rite, and yet there is evidence that makes it highly 
probable that Demeter and her marriage developed in Crete and 
came thence to Eleusis. 

Such is the tradition of the Homeric Hymn’: 


‘Dos is the name that to me my holy mother gave, 
And I am come from Crete across the wide sea-water wave.’ 
This may be a mere chance pirate legend, but such legends 
often echo ethnographical fact. 
Again at the close of the Hymn? the poet seems to remember 
the island route by which Demeter passed to Thessaly : 


‘Goddess who holdst the fragrance of Eleusis in thy hands, 
Mistress of rocky Antron and Paros’ sea-girt strand, 

Lady revered, fair Deo, gift-giver year by year, 

Thou and thy fair Persephone, to us incline thine ear.’ 


Whether Demeter brought her daughter from Crete must 
remain for the present unconsidered; but from mythology, not 
ritual, we learn that in Crete she had a Sacred Marriage. 
Calypso, recounting the tale of ancient mortal lovers of whom 
the gods were jealous, says?: ° 


‘So too fair-haired Demeter once in the spring did yield 
To love, and with Iasion lay in a new-ploughed field. 
But not for long she loved him, for Zeus high overhead 
Cast on him his white lightning and Iasion lay dead.’ 


1 Hymn. ad Cer. 122. ae OE 

3 Od. v. 125 vew & rpirddy. I venture to render rtpirédw by ‘in the spring,’ 
because Theophrastos (H.P. yu. 1) says there were three ploughings, one in the 
winter, one in the summer and a third between the two (dporos rpiros 6 ueraid 
Tovrwy) which must have been in the spring before the seed was sown. Triptolemos 
is the Eleusinian Iasion. 


566 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 














It is one of the lovely earth-born myths that crop up now and 
again in Homer, telling of an older simpler world, of gods who had 
only half emerged from the natural things they are, real earth 
born flesh and blood creatures, not splendid phantoms of an 
imagined Olympic pageant. To smite and slay these primitive 
divinities of the order he supersedes, Zeus is always ready with 
his virtuous thunderbolt. 

Hesiod?, if later in date, is almost always earlier in thought: 
than Homer. He knows of the Marriage and knows that it was 
in Crete: 


‘Demeter brought forth Ploutos; a glorious goddess she, 

And yet she loved Iasion, a mortal hero he. 

In Crete’s rich furrows lay they; glad and kindly was the birth 

Of him whose way is on the sea and over all the Earth. 

Happy, happy is the mortal who doth meet him as he goes, 

For his hands are full of blessings and his treasure overflows.’ 
Theocritus’ knows that this Marriage of Iasion was a Mystery: 


‘Oh, happy, happy, in his changeless fate, 

Endymion dreaming ; happy, Love, and great 
Iasion, who won the mystic joy 

That ye shall never learn, Unconsecrate !’ 
Hesiod is all husbandman; he knows of no mystery child’, 
only of the old agricultural mimetic rite and the child who is the 
fruits of the earth and of the sea. Zeus with his thunder has not 
yet come to make of innocent bliss a transgression. Hesiod might 


have written the ancient tag preserved for us by his scholiast*: 
‘Ah for the wheat and barley, O child Ploutos.’ 


The writer of the Homeric Hymn? is altogether Zeus-ridden, 
hence many of the anomalies and absurdities of the tale he so 
beautifully tells; he is Homeric in his aloofness from things primi- 
tive, he is also Orphic in his emphasis on the spiritual bliss of the 
initiated and in his other-worldliness. He is concerned to show 
their future weal rather than their present wealth : 


‘Blessed is he among men who is given these rites to know, 
But the uninitiate man, the man without, must go 
t th hi lot when dead in the dusk below.’ 

o no such happy lot when dead in the dusk below. 


Hes. Theog. 969. 

Theoer. Jd. 11. 50. Translated by Mr Gilbert Murray. 

In Samothrace, Iasion becomes a mystery-figure. He is the father of Korybas, 

and his sister Harmonia takes her iepds yauos to Thebes. Again the route is by the 

islands, see Diod. y. 45. 
4 Schol. ad Hes. Theog. 971 kal yap } mapouula ‘ rupdv Kal kpibGv, & vjmce Iodre.’ 
> Hom. Hymn. ad Cer. 480. 


“wore 


x] Crete and the Mysteries 567 


And yet, so strong is the ancient agricultural tradition and 
association of the rites that the primitive sacred child of Crete, the 
 Wealth-god, reemerges’ almost automatically at the close, though 
in half abstracted fashion, born of heaven not earth : 


‘Then when the goddess all things had ordered of her grace, 

She fared to high Olympus, their great assembly place. 

There do they dwell with Father Zeus, who thunders through the sky, 
Holy and reverend are their names, and great his earthly joy 

Whom they vouchsafe to love. Above all mortals is he blest, 

Swiftly they send to his great home Ploutos to be his guest.’ 

The mimetic marriage of Crete, a bit of sympathetic magic 
common to many primitive peoples, became a cardinal mystic 
rite. Diodorus’ in a very instructive passage tells us that in 
Crete ‘mysteries’ were not mysterious, and we shall not, I think, 
be far wrong if we suppose that the Cretan non-mysterious form 
was the earlier. After discussing Cretan mythology he says: 
‘The Cretans in alleging that they from Crete conferred on other 
mortals the services of the gods, sacrifices and rites appertaining 
to mysteries, bring forward this point as being to their thinking 
the principal piece of evidence. The rite of initiation, which is 
perhaps the most celebrated of all, is that which is performed by 
the Athenians at Eleusis, and the rite at Samothrace and that in 
Thrace among the Cicones, the country of Orpheus, inventor of 
rites, all these are imparted as mysteries, whereas in Crete at 
Cnossos the custom from ancient times was that these rites should 
be communicated openly and to all, and things that among the 
other peoples were communicated in secrecy among the Cretans 
no one concealed from any one who wished to know.’ 

The Cretans, like most patriots, went a little too far. The 
gods had not left themselves without witness among other peoples 
till they, the elect Cretans, started on their missionary enterprise. 
But, as regards certain mystery rites, as regards two of those 
discussed in detail, the Omophagia and the Sacred Marriage, 
may not their statement have been substantially true? Before 
the downward movement of Dionysos from the North, may there 
not have been an upward movement of (shall we say) Orpheus 
from the South? May not the Orphic mysteries of the Mother 
have started, or at least fully developed, in matriarchal Crete’, 


1 y. 483. 2 Diod. v. 77, and see Diod. v. 64. 
5 Plut. An sen. est ger. resp. xvii.  6¢ warpls Kai untpls (ws Kpfres xadobat). 


568 Orphic Mysteries rors 


Crete that was to the end ‘of the Mother, that refused even 
in her language to recognize the foolish empty patriarchalism, 
‘Father-land’? In Crete the discoveries of Mr Arthur Evans have 
shown usa splendid and barbarous civilization, mature, even deca- 
dent, before the uprising of Athens. From Crete to Athens came 
Epimenides, who is but a quasi-historical Orpheus, and with him 
he brought rites of cleansing. In Cretan ‘Mycenaean’ civilization’ 
and only there, is seen that strange blend of Egyptian and ‘ Pelas- 
gian’ that haunted Plutarch and made him say that Osiris was 
one with Dionysos, Isis with Demeter. 


Diodorus, quoting the local tradition, knows the very route by 
which the rites of Crete went northward, by way of the islands, 
by Samothrace home of the mysteries, up to the land of the Cicones. 
There, it would seem, Orpheus the sober met the raging wine-god, 
there the Maenads slew him, and repented and upraised his sanc- 
tuary. Thence the two religions, so different yet so intimately 
fused, came down to Greece, a conjoint force, dominant, irresistible. 
Mysticism and ‘Enthusiasm’ are met together, and, for Greek 
religion, the last word is said. 

Orpheus for all his lyre-playing is a priest or rather a ‘reli- 
gious. Dionysos is, at least as we know him at Athens, less 
priest than artist. Most primitive religions have dpoéueva, but 
from the religion of Dionysos sprang the drama. The analogy 
between épaeva, things done, actions, and dpaua, a Thing Acted 
in the stage sense, has been often observed, but the problem still 
remains—why was the transition effected in the religion of Dio- 
nysos and in his only, why have Athene and Zeus and Poseidon no 
drama, only dpepeva ? 


h. The Drama of Dionysos and the 8peépeva of Eleusis. 


The question would not be raised here but that the answer 
I would suggest comes mainly from religion, and some stages of 3 
the transition are, I believe, to be found in the ritual of Eleusis. 

Kpic, lyric and dramatic poetry succeed each other in our 
handbooks and our minds in easy and canonical fashion. Lyric 





1 A.J. Evans, The Palace of Knossos in its Egyptian relations, Egypt Exploration 
Fund, Arch, Report 1899—90, p. 60. 


x] The Drama and the Apopeva 569 


poetry asks no explanation, or finds it instantly in our common 
human egotism. But we are apt to forget that from the epos, the 
narrative, to the drama, the enactment, is a momentous step, 
one, so far as we know, not taken in Greece till after centuries of 
epic achievement, and then taken suddenly, almost in the dark, and 
irrevocably. All we really know of this momentous step is that it 
was taken some time in the sixth century B.c. and taken in con- 
nection with the worship of Dionysos. Surely it is at least possible 
that the real impulse to the drama lay not wholly in ‘ goat-songs’ and 
‘circular dancing places’ but also in the cardinal, the essentially 


dramatic, conviction of the religion of Dionysos, that the w | 


can not only worship, but ca be, his god}, Athene 
and Zeus and Poseidon have .no drama because no one, in his 
wildest moments, believed he could become and be Athene or Zeus 
or Poseidon. It is indeed only in the orgiastic religions that these 
splendid moments of conviction could come, and, for Greece at 
least, only in an orgiastic religion did the drama take its rise. 

In the rites at Eleusis of which most details are known we 
have the very last stage of the development before the final step 
was actually taken, we have dp@peva on the very verge of drama. 


Late authors in describing the Eleusinian rites use constantly 
the vocabulary of the stage, Take the account of Psellus*, whose 
testimony has been too much neglected. Psellus is recording 


1 An instance of a sacred pantomime in which the parts of gods were taken 
by ‘Iobacchoi’ is given in another connection (p. 475), but this pantomime cannot 
be used as evidence. Its date is long after the rise of the drama. 

2 Psellus, Quaenam sunt Graecorum opiniones de daemonibus 3 (ed. Migne). a dé 
ye wuoTnpia ToUTwY ola abtixa TA’ ENevolia Tov wvOiKov Uroxpiverar Ala uvyviuevoy Hyouv 
TH Anot 4 ry Anunrepe kal tH Ovyarpi TavTns Pepepdtry, TH Kai Képy. "Emevdn dé 
éwedNov Kai appodiowns eri TH wujoer yiverOar cuuTdokai, dvadveral mws 7 “Adpodirn 
amd Twwy TeT\ATHEVUN pndéwy TEAGY.OS. Hira 6€ yaunduos ert TH Képy buevatos. Kal 
tmadovew oi TeNovpmevor ‘ Ex TUMMdvoU Eparyor, EK KuuBddwv Em.ov, Extpvopopynaa, bd Tov 
maorov eicébuv.” “TLrroxpiverae 6€ kal Tas Anois wdivas. ‘Ikernpiac yoov aitixa Anods. 
Kal xXoAjs moots Kai Kapdcadyiar. "E@’ ois kal rpaydoxenes iunua mabawébuevov tepl Tots 
didvpors 67e wep O Leds dikas aroriwvds rhs Blas Ty Ajuntpe Tpdyou dpxes amoTeu“av TO 
Ké\r@ Tats KaTébeTo Worep 67 Kal éavTod. “Emi waow ai tod Atovicov Timai Kal 4 
kioTts Kal Ta wodvoudaa mérava kal of TW LaBafiw TeXovpevor Kali of unrpidgovres 
KAwdwves te kai Miwaddédves, kal tis HXav AEBns Geompudrecos kal Awduvacov yadxetov 
kal KoptSas dAXos kal Kovpys Erepos dawmovev miuiuata. "Ed’ ois ) BavBw rods 
Mnpovs avacupouevn kal 0 yuvaiKelos Kreis: oUTw yap dvoudfovcr Ti aide aicxrvduevor. 
Kai otitws &v aicxpe riy tederH Katadvovow. 

I owe this reference to Taylor’s Eleusinian Mysteries. The book is by modern 
authorities as a rule contemptuously ignored, probably because Taylor’s construing 
is always vague and often inaccurate and he entirely declines to accentuate his 
Greek. In spite of these minor drawbacks his attitude towards the interpretation 
of the Mysteries is far in advance of that of many better furnished scholars. 


570 Orphic Mysteries [ CH. 


‘what the Greeks believe about demons’ and he passes from theo- 
logy to ritual. ‘Yes and the mysteries of these (demons), as for 
example those of Eleusis, enact the double story of Deo or 
Demeter and her daughter Pherephatta or Kore. As in the rite 
of initiation love affairs are to take place, Aphrodite of the Sea is 
represented as uprising. Next there is the wedding rite for Kore. 
And the initiated sing as an accompaniment “I have eaten from 
the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbals, I have carried the 
kernos, 1 have gone down into the bridal chamber.” Then also 
they enact the birth-pains of Deo. At least there are cries of 
entreaty of Deo, and there is the draught of gall and the throes 
of pain. After these there is a goat-legged mime because of what 


_ Zeus did to Demeter. After all this there are the rites of Dionysos 


and the cista and the cakes with many bosses and the initiated 
to Sabazios and the Klodones and Mimallones who do'the rites of 
the Mother and the sounding cauldron of Thesprotia and the 
gong of Dodona and a Korybas and a Koures, separate figures, 
mimic forms of demons. After this is the action of Baubo!’ 

Psellus shows us the sacred pantomime in full complexity. 
From other sources we know that it was not all dumb-show, that 
other words were spoken besides the confession of the ‘tokens.’ 
Galen® when he is urging his readers to attend to natural science no 
less than theology says: ‘Lend me then your whole attention even 
more than you did supposing you were initiated in the Eleusinian 
and Samothracian mysteries or any other holy rite and gave 
yourself up wholly to the things done and the things spoken by the 
Hierophants.’ 

The fashion in which the ‘things spoken’ supplemented and 
helped out the ‘things done’ comes out very clearly in the curious 


1 The account of Psellus is for obvious reasons rather resumed than translated. 
Some of the rites recorded by Psellus are not in harmony with modern conventions, 
and for my purpose it is not needful to discuss them. But once for all I wish 
to record my conviction that such evil as we find in these mysteries we bring 
with us. The mind of Herondas is not the measure of primitive sanctities, 
The story of Babo or Baubo has always been a stumbling-block, but we know now 
that her action was a primitive and perfectly reverent mpoBacxdvioy; as such it 
is depicted on ancient amulets. Its significance and its apotropaic potency alike 
appear in the very early matriarchal legend of the Lycian Bellerophon (Plut. 
de mulier. virt. 1x.). The true mystic said with Heracleitos (ap. Clem. Protr. 1. 
p. 30): El un yap Avcoviow moumhy érolevvro kal tuveov dona aldolow, dvadécrara 
elpyacr’ dv: avros dé Aténs kal Acévucos drew walvovra kaiAnvaifovow. See Pileiderer, 
Die Philosophie des Heraklit im Lichte der Mysterienidee, p. 28. 

* Galen, de Usu Part. vit. 14 § 469; see Lobeck, Aglaoph. p. 68. 





x] Doctrine of Immortality b71 


fictitious legal case which occurs among the collection of rhetorical 
exercises made by Sopater. A young man dreams that he is 
initiated, and sees the ‘things done.’ He recounts the ‘things 
done’ to an initiated friend and asks if they correspond to the 
actual Eleusinian rite. The friend nods assent. Is the friend 
guilty of impiety, ie. has he revealed the ‘things done’ to one 
uninitiated? No, argues the initiated man, for the dreamer was 
really initiated by the goddesses themselves; only one thing was 
lacking to him, he had not heard the voice of the hierophant so 
as to understand clearly the sense of the symbols uttered by him. 
The symbols uttered must have been words corresponding to, 
explanatory of, the things done, dark enough no doubt, but felt to 
be illuminating. The Hierophant acted as sacred showman to 
the pantomime. Here we have brought into close, inevitable con- 
junction the narrative element of the epos and the action element 
of the drama. We have all the apparatus of the stage, the ap- 
pearances and disappearances, the dancing and the singing, the 
lights, the voices and the darkness. Religion gave all the circum- 
stances and the scenery, religion woke the instinct of intense 
impersonation, some genius made the dumb figures speak them- 
selves and tragedy was born. 


Dionysos gave men tragedy to gladden and to greaten their 
toilsome life on earth. His other great gift was, as has been 
already shown, the hope that by attaining divinity they would as a 
necessary consequence attain immortality. To the dim forecast of 
some sort of after guerdon that Demeter gave, he brought some- 
thing as near conviction as the human mind can get. Plutarch? 
writes to his wife when they have lost their little girl, who 
was so like the father and so dear to the mother, and he bids her 

‘remember both her traditional faith and ‘the mystic symbols of the 
rites of initiation to Dionysos. These, he says, will prevent her 
from thinking that the soul suffers nothing after death, that it 
ceases to be. He reads into these rites of course his own Plato- 
nism; they teach him that the soul is like a bird caught in a cage, 
caught and recaught ever in new births, that the evil of old age is 


1 Sopat. Dist. Quaest. Walz, Rhet. Graec., vol. vit. p. 1. 
2 Plut. Consol. ad wxor. x. 6re kwdver oe TicTEvEL 6 TaTpLos Novos Kal TH MUOTLKG 
ovpBora Tay tepi Tov Acévucoy dpyacuav a ctyiomev GAHAoLS oi KoLVODYTES. 


572. Orphic Mysteries [cH. xq 


not its wrinkles and grey hairs but, hardest thing of all, the dim- 


ness and staleness of the soul to the memory of things ‘there’ not — 


here; and the soul that leaves the body soon is not cramped and 
bent but only softly and pliantly moulded and soon shakes its 
mane and is free, just as fire that is quenched and relighted forth- 
with flames and sparkles anew. The customs of his country for- 
bade him to make libations for children, and he reads into the old 
barbarous convention, based on the harmlessness of the child-ghost, 
the doctrine that children have no part in earth and earthly things, 
but have passed straightway to a better and more divine fate. Still 
in the mystic symbols of Dionysos he sees only what was there 
implicit if only in dim fashion. 


It has been thought that the rites of Eleusis and other Orphic 
mysteries contained among these ‘things done’ mimetic presen- 
tations of a future life, a sort of revelation and instruction for the 
conduct of the soul in the world below. Elements of this kind, 
it will later be seen, may easily have been interpolated from Egypt, 
but for Eleusis we have no certain evidence. The best witness 
to the faith of the Orphic as to the future life are his own con- 
fessions buried with him in his tomb, scribed happily for us on 
imperishable gold, and to this witness we must now turn. 


cn een 


a 


CHAPTER Xi: 


ORPHIC ESCHATOLOGY. 
‘XaipeT, €ra S YMMIN G€0C AMBpOTOC, OYKETI ONHTOC.’ 
a. THE ORPHIC TABLETS. 


THE monuments in question are a series of eight inscribed 
tablets all of very thin gold, which have come to light in tombs. 
Six out of the eight were found in Lower Italy, in the neighbour- 
hood of ancient Sybaris, one near Rome, one in Crete. In the first 
and third cases, it should be noted, the place provenance is an ancient 
home of Orphism. These tablets are of such cardinal importance 
that they will need to be examined separately and in detail. But 
all have this much in common: buried with the dead they contain 
instructions for his conduct in the world below, exhortations to the 
soul, formularies to be repeated, confessions of faith and of ritual 
performed, and the like. They belong to the domain of ritual 
rather than of literature, and therefore offer evidence the more 
unimpeachable; but, though defective in style and often regardless 
of metre, they are touched with a certain ecstasy of conviction 
that lifts them sometimes to a high level of poetry. 

The Orphic tablets have frequently been discussed', but their 
full importance as documents for the history of Greek religion has 
perhaps as yet not been fully realized. Their interpretation 
presents exceptional difficulties; the shining surface and creased 
condition of the gold-leaf on which they are written make them 
difficult to photograph and irksome to decipher; moreover the 
text, even when deciphered, is in some cases obviously fragmentary. 
It has been thought best to reserve all textual difficulties for 
separate discussion?. 

1 See especially A. Dieterich, Nekuia, pp. 84 ff., and De Hymnis Orphicis, 


pp- 31 ff. Other references are given in the notes and Appendix. 
2 In the Appendix kindly written for me by Mr Gilbert Murray. 


574 Orphic Eschatology [cH. 4 


The series of tablets or scrolls is as follows: 


I. The Petelia tablet (fig. 162). 










EY PHZEE 1 Z Ap jaAQAom LN EPAPISTE PAKP HN 
HNTAP AA YTH IAEY KHNEZTH K YIANKVIA Pissoy = 
TAY THE THERD HN HEMHOESAERONEMNE Anz E[ALS 


EY PHZE le AETEPANTH { MNHMOLYN HEATON MPH 
YY XpoN f 






Fic. 162. 


‘Thou shalt find on the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring, 
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. 

To this Well-spring approach not near. 

But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory, 

Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it. 

Say: “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven ; 

But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves. 

And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly 
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.” 

And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well-spring, 
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship...’ 


The text breaks off at this point. The scattered words that 
remain make no consecutive sense. Of the last line, written from 
bottom to top of the right edge of the tablet, the two last words 
only are legible, ‘darkness enfolding’ (cxoTos audixadvas). 


1 Brit. Mus. Gold Ornament Room, Table-Case H. Kaibel, CIGIS, No. 641. 
The tablet had been rolled up and placed in a hexagonal cylinder hanging from a 
delicate gold chain and doubtless worn by the dead person as an amulet. The 
facsimile reproduced here and first published J.H.S. m1. p. 112 was verified for 
Prof. Comparetti by Mr Cecil Smith and supersedes Kaibel’s publication. As the 
letters in the original are small and in places not easily legible, Mr Smith’s 
reading is given below: 

Kipjocers 0 Aldao dduwv ém’ dpiorepa Kpiy ny 
map 6 abrie NeuKhy éornkviay KuTdpiocov* 

TaUTNS THS KpHvyns unde cxeddv Eurreacecas. 
Hipjoecs & érépav ris Mvnuwoot’vns amd Niurns 
Yuxpov tdwp mpopéov: Piaxes 6 éerlmpocbev Eacw. 
Kirretv- yijs mats elut cal otpavotd dorepdevTos, 
avrap éuol yévos ovjpdviov: réde 5’ tore xal ad’rol: 
diye & elul aty cal drd\d\umac* adda 67’ ala 
Yuxpov Udwp mpopéov ris Mvnuootyns amo Niurns* 
Kav[Toi go]t dwoovcr meeiv Oelns amd Kphv\ns 

kal Tér’ rer’ ad[ANooe med’)] Hpweoow avactes] 
soteaeaatos tS TOOE!.. cnn Riknanesvareer yeas camer een Onl ee 
eauiseect eae reeeoetene 700’ &ypay[ev ?]... 

se oisaitgasiesloiatnaseae eees cecesseeessee OKOTOS Gugixartas. 


xT] Mnemosyne and Lethe 575 


As sequel to this tablet comes a second found in Crete: 
Il. , The Eleuthernae tablet}. 


‘T am parched with thirst and I perish.—Nay, drink of Me, 
The well-spring flowing for ever on the Right, where the Cypress is. 


Whence art thou?—I am‘son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.’ 


The soul itself speaks to the Well of Mnemosyne and the Well 
makes answer. 

Both tablets contain the same two elements, the Well of 
Remembrance, and the avowal of origin. The avowal of origin 
constitutes in each the claim to drink of the Well. 

The origin claimed is divine. Hesiod? uses exactly the same 
words in describing the parentage of the gods. He bids the 
Muse 


‘Sing the holy race of Immortals ever existing, 
Who from Earth were born and born from Starry Heaven.’ 

We have in the avowal of the soul the clearest possible state- 
ment of the cardinal doctrine of Orphic faith—immortality is 
possible only in virtue of the divinity of humanity. The sacrament 
of this immortality is the drinking of a divine well. 


THE WELL OF MNEMOSYNE. 


On the first tablet the soul is bidden to avoid a well on the 
left hand. This well is left nameless, but contrasted as it is with 
the Well of Mnemosyne or Remembrance, we may safely conclude 

hat the forbidden well is Lethe, Forgetfulness. 

The notion that in death we forget, forget the sorrows of this 
troublesome world, forget the toilsome journey to the next, is not 
Orphiec, not even specially Greek; it is elemental, human, and may. 
occur anywhere. 

The Fiji islanders® have their ‘ Path of the Shades’ beset with 
perils and their Wai-na-dula, a well from which the dead man 
drinks and forgets sorrow. ‘He passed the twin goddesses Nino 


1 Joubin, Bull. de Corr. Hell. xv1t. 1893, p. 122. This tablet, with two others 
which are duplicates of the one here given, are now in the National Museum at 
Athens. For fac-similes and discussion of text see Appendix. 

2 Hes. Theog. 135. 

* Basil Thomson, ‘The Kalou-Vu’ (Journal Anthrop. Inst. May 1895, p. 349), 
I am indebted for this reference to Mr Andrew Lang’s Homeric Hymms p. 91. 


576 Orphic Eschatology [CH. | 


who peered at him and gnashed their terrible teeth, fled up the 
path and came to a spring and stopped and drank, and, as soon as 
he tasted the water, he ceased weeping, and his friends also ceased 
weeping in his home, for they straightway forgot their sorrows 
and were consoled. Therefore this spring is called the Wai-na- 
dula, Water of Solace.’ After many other perils, including the 
escape from two savage Dictynnas who seek to catch him in their 
nets, the soul at last is allowed to pass into the dancnr grounds 
where the young gods dance and sing. 

This Fiji parallel is worth noting because it is so different. 
The Fiji soul drinks of forgetfulness, and why? Because his friends 
and relations must put a term to their irksome mourning, and till 
the soul sets the example and himself forgets they must remember. 
His confession of faith is also somewhat different. Before he can 
be admitted to his Happy Land he must prove that he has died 
a violent death, otherwise he must go back to the upper air and 
die respectably, 1.e. violently. 

‘I have noted the Lethe of the Fiji islands to shew that I am 


not unaware that savage parallels exist, that a well may be drunk 


on the ‘Path of the Shades’ in any land, and that there is no need 
to suppose that the Greeks borrowed their well either from Fiji or 
from Egypt; and yet in this particular case it can, I believe, be 
shewn that the Orphic well came from Egypt', came I believe to 
Crete, and passed with Orpheus from Crete by the islands to 
Thrace and to Athens, and thence to Magna Graecia. 

Osiris in Egypt had a ‘cold’ well or water of which he gave 
the souls to drink. On tombs of Roman date? the formulary 


appears: ‘May Osiris give thee the cold water.’ Sometimes it 


is Aidoneus sometimes Osiris who is invoked, for by that time 


1 Mr Lang, op. cit. p. 81, examines ‘the alleged Egyptian origins’ of the 
Eleusinian mysteries and decides against M. Foucart’s theory in toto. Mr Lang 
certainly succeeds in showing that for all Greek mysteries a satisfactory savage 
analogy can be found; but this surely does not preclude the possibility of occasional 
borrowing. Crete has shown conclusively that ‘Mycenaean’ art borrowed from 
Egy pt: why not ‘Mycenaean’ religion? See Classical Review, Feb. 1903, p. 84. 

2 Kaibel, CIGIS 1842: 

yx xpov tdwp doln cor dvat évépwy >Acdwrets, 

@ Méd\av* 78s yap cor dwwdero Pidrarov dvAos 
and 1488 O(eois) K(araxoviows). edwiyxer, Kupla, Kal dot cor 6 "Oorpis ro Wuxpdy Udwp. 
For the analogy of the Christian refrigerium see Mr J. A. Stewart’s interesting 
note in the Classical Review for March 1903, p. 117, published since the above 
was written. See Dieterich, Nekuia p. 95, and Foucart, Recherches sur U Origine 
et la Nature des Mysteres @’ Eleusis, Paris 1895, p. 68. 













































ahaa TI ig ET a A ens a 


x1] Mnemosyne and Lethe | 577 


the two were not clearly distinguished. In so far as Osiris was 
a sun-god the well became a well of light, in which the sun-god 
Ra was wont to wash his face. In one of the magical papyri! the 
line occurs 


‘Hail to the water white and the tree with the leaves high hanging,’ 


which seems to echo vaguely the white cypress and the forbidden 
well. The well of Osiris, whatever the precise significance of its 
Egyptian name, would easily to the Greeks become of double 
significance ; Wuypov would suggest yuy7, and the well would be 
both cool and fresh and life-giving; by it the soul would revive 
(avavyev), 1t would become ‘a living water, springing up into 
everlasting life.’ 

A ‘living water’ given by Osiris to the thirsty soul was part of 
the eschatology of Egypt, but, so far as we know, Egypt had 
neither Lethe nor Mnemosyne. In the Book of the Dead there 
occurs indeed the Chapter of making a man possess memory in the 
underworld (No. Xxv.), but the process has no connection with 
the drinking from a well. The Chapter of drinking water in the 
underworld (No. LXII.) is quite distinct. Lethe and Mnemosyne 
are, I think, Greek developments from the neutral fonds of Egypt, 
and developments due to the influence of Orpheus. 


Lethe as a person is as old as Hesiod*. She is bad from the 
beginning : 
; ‘Next hateful Strife gave birth to grievous Toil, 
Forgetfulness and Famine, tearful Woes, 
Contests and Slaughters.’ 


By the time of Aristophanes the ‘plain of Lethe’ is part of the 
stock furniture of Hades. In the Frogs* Charon on the look-out 
for passengers asks: 


‘Who's for the plain of Lethe? Who’s for the Donkey-shearings ? 
Who’s for the Cerberus folk? or Taenarus? Who’s for the Rookeries 2’ 


The mystic comic Hades of Aristophanes is thoroughly Orphice. 
He mentions no well, but he knows of a Stone of Parching*, where 
it may be the thirsty soul sat down to rest. 


1 Dieterich, Abraxas, p. 97: 
xatpe d€ evKov VOwp Kal dévdpeov wurérndov. 
It is perhaps worth noting that in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Vignette to 
Chapter ixi. A.) the dead man receives water from a goddess in a tree growing 
out of a pool of water. 
2 Hes. Theog. 227. 3 Ar. Ran. 186. 4 Ib. 194 rapa tov Abaivou NiGor. 


H. 37 


578 Orphic Eschatology [ex [ 


Lethe as a water, a river, first appears in the Republic of Plato* 
and in such fashion that it seems as though it was by that time 
proverbial. ‘Our story, says Socrates, ‘has been saved and has 
not perished, and it will save us if we are obedient to it, and we 
shall make a good passage of the river of Lethe and shall not be 
defiled in our souls.’ It is noticeable that to Plato Lethe is of 
death and pollution. Just before, Socrates has recounted the myth 
of Er, a myth steeped in Orphic eschatology of metempsychosis 
and retribution. The souls have been forced to pass each one into 
the plain of Lethe through scorching suffocating heat, for the plain 
of Lethe was devoid of trees and of plants that spring from the 
earth. Towards evening they took shelter by the river of Unmind- 
fulness whose water no vessel can hold*. Of this all were compelled 
to drink a certain measure, and those who were not safe-guarded 
by wisdom drank more than the measure, and each one as he 
drank forgot all things. The river Ameles, Unmindfulness, is of 
course Lethe: Plato likes to borrow a popular notion and slightly 
rechristen it. Just so he takes Mnemosyne, Remembrance, and 
makes of her Anamnesis, Remembering-again. It was not the 
fashion of his day to give chapter and verse for your borrowings, 
and Plato so detested the lower side of Orphic rites that perhaps he 
only half realized the extent of his debts. It is a human and rather 
malicious touch, that in the order of those who remember again, 
the man who lives the ‘initiated life’ comes only fifth, side by side 
with the seer, below the philosopher and the lover and the righteous 
king and the warrior, below even the economist and the man of 
business; but after all he cannot much complain, for low though 
he is, he is above the poet and the artist. Moreover Plato would 
take as clearly and vividly known to the initiated all that through 
lapse of time has become dim to us, and his constant use of the 
technical terms of initiation is adequate acknowledgement. He 
tells* of the uninitiate (auvntos), the partly initiate (aréXeoTos), 
the newly initiate (veotedys), wholly initiate (apriteryjs), of the 
man rapt by the divine (€v@ovovafwv), whom the vulgar deem 
distraught, of how before we were caught in the prison of the body 
we celebrated (@pytafopev) a most blessed rite, being initiated to 

1 Plat. Rep. x. 621. 


2 A reminiscence of Styx, see Pausanias vu. 18. 5 and Dr Frazer’s commentary. 
3 Plat. Phaedr, 249 ff. 





XI] Mnemosyne and Lethe 579 


behold dimly and see perfectly (uvovpevor cai erromtevovtes) appa- 
ritions complete, simple, quiet and happy, shining in a clear light. 

For Mnemosyne and Lethe in Greek religion we are not however 
dependent on the myths and philosophy of Plato. We have definite 
evidence in local ritual. Mnemosyne herself takes us straight to 
the North, the land of Eumolpos and the Muses, to Pangaion, to 
Pieria, to Helicon. If Orpheus found in Egypt, or as is more 
probable in Crete, a well of living water, that well was I think name- 
less,-or at least did not bear the name of Mnemosyne. It may of 
course be accidental, but in the tablet from Crete the well, though 
obviously the same as that in the Petelia tablet,is unnamed. The 
name Mnemosyne was found for the well when Orpheus took it 
with him to the land of the Muses, where he himself got his magic 
lyre. Not ten miles away from the slopes of Helicon, at the 
sanctuary of Trophonios at Lebadeia, we find a well not only of 
Mnemosyne but also of Lethe, and we find the worshipper is made 
to drink of these wells not in the imagined kingdom of the dead, 
but in the actual ritual of the living. Man makes the next world 
in the image of this present. 

Pausanias! has left us a detailed account of the ritual of the 
oracle of Trophonios of which only the essential points can be 
noted here. Before the worshipper can actually descend into the 
oracular chasm, he must spend some days in a house that is a 
sanctuary of the Agathos Daimon and of Tyche; then he is 
purified and eats sacrificial flesh. After omens have been taken 
and a black ram sacrificed into a trench, the inquirer is washed 
and anointed and led by the priests to certain ‘springs of water 
which are very near to one another, and then he must drink of 
the water called Forgetfulness (A7@ys), that there may be forget- 
fulness of everything that he has hitherto had in his mind, and 
after that he drinks of yet another water called Memory (Mynyo- 
avvns), by which he remembers what he has seen when he goes 
down below.’ He is then shown an image which Daedalus made, 
Le. a very ancient xoanon, and one which was only shown to those 
who are going to visit Trophonios; this he worships and prays to, 
and then, clad in a linen tunic—another Orphic touch—and girt 
with taeniae and shod with boots of the country he goes to the 


Heine Bt) Gale 





580 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


oracle. The ritual that follows is of course a descent into the | 


underworld, the man goes down into the oven-shaped cavity, an 
elaborate artificial chasm, enters a hole, is dragged through by the 
feet, swirled away, hears and sees ‘the things that are to be’ (ra 
uédnXovta), he comes up feet foremost and then the priests set him 
on the seat, called the seat of Memory, which is near the shrine. 
They question him and, when they have learnt all they can, give 
him over to his friends, who carry him possessed by fear and 
unconscious to the house of Agathe Tyche and Agathos Daimon 
where he lodged before. Then he comes to himself and, one is 
relieved to hear, is able to laugh again. Pausanias says expressly 
that he had been through the performance himself and is not 
writing from hearsay. 

The Orphic notes in this description are many. To those 
already discussed we may add that Demeter at Lebadeia was 
known as Europa, a name which points to Crete. Another 
Cretan link indicates that the worship of Trophonios was, as 
we should expect if it is Dionysiac, of orgiastic character. 
Plutarch’, in a passage that has not received the attention it 
deserves, classes together certain daemons who ‘do not always stay 
in the moon, but descend here below to have the supervision of 
oracular shrines, and they are present at and celebrate the orgies 


of the most sublime rites. They are punishers of evil deeds — 


and watchers over such.’ The word watchers (¢vAaxes) is the same 
as that used in the tablet of the guardians of Mnemosyne’s well. 


If in the performance of their office they themselves do wrong — 


either through fear or favour, they themselves suffer for it, and in | 
characteristically Orphic fashion they are thrust down again and ~ 
tied to human bodies. Then comes this notable statement. ‘Those — 


; 


| 


of the age of Kronos said that they themselves were of the better 


sort of these daemons, and the Idaean Daktyls who were former ly 


in Crete, and the Korybantes who were in Phrygia, and the 


Trophoniads in Lebadeia, and thousands of others throughout the 
world whose titles, sanctuaries and honours remain to the day.’ 


‘ 
a 
i 


The rites of Daktyls, Korybants and Trophoniads are all the same _ 


and all are orgiastic and of the nature of initiation, all deal with 


1 Plut. de fac. in orb. lun. xxx. adr xpnorn plow dedpo xarlacw émimednoduevar Kal 
Tals dvwrarw cuumaperor Kal oguvopytdsovar Trav TeNeTav. Kodagral re ylvovra Kal 
purakes adiknudrwv. 


xI] Mnemosyne and Lethe 581 


purgation and the emergence of the divine. All have rites that 
tell of ‘things to be’ and prepare the soul to meet them. 

Pausanias of course understands ‘things to be’ (ra pwéAXOvTa) as 
merely the future, his attention is fixed on what is merely oracular 
and prophetic. The action of Lethe is to prepare a blank sheet 
for the reception of the oracle of Mnemosyne, to make the utter- 
ance of the oracle indelible. In point of fact, no doubt, the 
Trophoniads, the Orphics, found when they came to Lebadeia 
an ancient hero-oracle. That is clear from the sacrifice of the 
ram in the trench, a sacrifice made, be it observed, not to Tro- 
phonios but to Agamedes, the old hero. That the revelation at 
Lebadeia of ‘things to be’ was to the Orphic a vision of and 
a preparation for the other world (7a éxe?) is clear from the 
experiences recounted by Timarchos! as having occurred to him 
in the chasm of Trophonios. Socrates, it 1s said, was angry that 
no one told bim about it while Timarchos was alive, for he would 
have liked to hear about it at first hand. What Timarchos saw 
was a vision of heaven and hell after the fashion of a Platonic 
myth, and his guide instructed him as to the meaning of things and 
how the soul shakes off the impurities of the body. The whole 
ecstatic mystic account beginning with the sensation of a blow on 
the head and the sense of the soul escaping, reads like a trance- 
experience or like the revelation experienced under an anaesthetic. 
It may be, and probably is, an invention from beginning to end. 
The important point is that this vision of things invisible is con- 
sidered an appropriate experience to a man performing the rites 
of Trophonios. 

The worshipper initiated at Lebadeia drank of Lethe; there 
was evil still to forget. The Orphic who, after a lite spent in 
purification, passed into Hades, had done with forgetting ; his soul 
drinks only of Remembrance. It is curious to note that in the 
contrast between Lethe and Mnemosyne we have what seems 
to be an Orphic protest against the lower, the sensuous side of the 
religion of Dionysos. To Mnemosyne, it will be remembered 
(p. 509), as to the Muses, the Sun and the Moon and the other 
primitive potencies affected by the Orphics, the Athenians offered 
only wineless offerings, but ‘ancestral tradition,’ Plutarch? tells us, 


1 Plut. de Gen. Soc. xxt. fi. 2 Plut. Symp. Proem. and vu. 5. 3. 


582 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


‘consecrated to Dionysos, Lethe, together with the narthex. It 
is this ancestral tradition that Teiresias! remembers when he tells 
of the blessings brought by the god, and how 
‘He rests man’s spirit dim 

From grieving, when the vine exalteth him. 

He giveth sleep to sink the fretful day 

In cool forgetting. Is there any way 

With man’s sore heart save only to forget ?’ 

To man entangled in the flesh, man to whom sleep for the 
body, death for the soul was the only outlook, Lethe became 
a Queen of the Shades, Assessor of Hades. Orestes*, outworn 
with madness, cries 

O magic of sweet sleep, healer of pain, 

I need thee and how sweetly art thou come. 
O holy Lethe, wise physician thou, 

Goddess invoked of miserable men.’ 

Orpheus found for ‘miserable men’ another way, not by the 
vine-god, but through the wineless ecstasy of Mnemosyne. The 
Orphic hymn‘ to the goddess ends with the prayer 

‘And in thy mystics waken memory 
Of the holy rite, and Lethe drive afar.’ 

Lethe is to the Orphic as to Hesiod wholly bad, a thing from 
which he must purge himself. Plato® is thoroughly Orphic when 
he says in the Phaedrus that the soul sinks to earth ‘full of 
forgetfulness and vice. The doctrine as to future punishment 
which Plutarch* expounds in his treatise ‘On Living Hidden’ 
touches the high water mark of Orphic eschatology. The extreme 
penalty of the wicked in Erebos is not torture but unconsciousness 
(ayvo.a). Pindar’s ‘sluggish streams of murky night, he says, 
receive the guilty, and hide them in unconsciousness and forget- 
fulness. He denies emphatically the orthodox punishments, the 
gnawing vulture, the wearisome labours; the body cannot suffer 
torment or bear its marks, for the body is rotted away or consumed 
by fire; ‘the one and only instrument of punishment is uncon- 
sciousness and obscurity, utter disappearance, carrying a man into 


1 Bur. Bacch. 280. 

2 Apollod. Epit. Vat. 6. 3. 3 Eur. Or. 211. 

4 Orph. Hymn, Uxxvit. 5 Plat. Phaedr. p. 248 c. 

6 Plut. de occult. viv. sub fin. deyduevoe kal daroxpimrovres dyvola xal AjOy Tods 
ko\afouevous...ev KoNacrhpiov.,.ddokla Kal dyvoia Kai Tavrehws ddavicmods alpwv els Tov 
dpedn rorapov ard THs AHOns. 





i 


XI] Lethe and Eunoé in Dante 583 


the smileless river that flows from Lethe, sinking him into an 
abyss and yawning gulf, bringing in its train all obscurity and all 
unconsciousness.’ 


The Orphic well of Mnemosyne lives on not only in the 
philosophy of Plato, but also, it would seem, in the inspired vision of 
Dante. At the close of the Purgatorio, when Dante? is wandering 
through the ancient wood, his steps are stayed by a little stream 
so pure that it hid nothing, and beside it all other waters seemed 
to have in them some admixture. The lady gathering flowers on 
the further bank tells him he is now in the Earthly Paradise: 
the Highest Good made man good and for goodness and gave him 
this place as earnest of eternal peace. Man fell away, 

‘changed to toil and weeping 
His honest laughter and sweet mirth.’ 
Then she tells of the virtue of the little stream. It does not rise, 
like an earthly water, from a vein restored by evaporation, losing 
and gaining force in turn, but issues from a fountain sure and 
safe, ever receiving again by the will of God as much as on two 
sides it pours forth. 
‘On this side down it flows and with a virtue 
That takes away from man of sin the memory, 
On that the memory of good deeds it bringeth. 
Lethe its name on this side and Eunoé 


On that, nor does it work its work save only 
If first on this side then on that thou taste it’ 


Dante hears a voice unspeakable say Asperges me, and is 
bathed in Lethe, and thereafter cannot wholly remember what 
made him to sin. Beatrice says to him smiling, 


‘And now bethink thee thou hast drunk of Lethe; 
And if from smoke the flame of fire be argued, 

This thine oblivion doth conclude most clearly 

A fault within thy Will elsewhere intended.’ 


And she turns to her attendant maid saying, 


‘See there Eunoé from its source forth flowing. 
Lead thou him to it, and as thou art wonted 
His virtue partly dead do thou requicken.’ 


1 Dante Purg. xxvit. 130, xxx. 98, xxxm. 127. I owe this reference to Dante’s 
well to the kindness of Mr F. M. Cornford. He tells me that the source from which 
Dante took Hunoé is not known. 





584 Orphic Eschatology ‘is (CH. 


And Dante comes back from ‘that most holy wave’: 


‘Refect was I, and as young plants renewing 
Their new leaves with new shoots, so I in spirit 
Pure, and disposed to mowtnt towards starry heaven.’ 






















The Eunoé! of Dante is Good-Consciousness, or the Consciousness 
of Good. It is the result of a purified, specialized memory, from 
which evil has fallen away. On the tomb-inscriptions the formu- 
lary occurs edvolas kal wvnuns xapw ‘for good thought and remem- 
brance’ sake, where the two are very near together. It is just 
what the Orphic meant by his Remembrance of the Divine, and, 
when we come to the next tablet, it will seem probable that not 
only the idea of Good-Consciousness but the very name Hunoww 
may perhaps have been suggested to Dante by an analogous Orphic 
well Znnoia. 


THE SYBARIS TABLETS. 


Six tablets still remain to be considered. Of these five were all 
found in tombs in the territory of ancient Sybaris, in the modern 
commune of Corigliano-Calabro. Two of them (III and Iv) were 
found together in a tomb known locally as the Timpone grande. 
They were folded closely together, and lay near the skull of the 
skeleton. Their contents, so far as they can be deciphered, are as 
follows : 

Ill. Yimpone grande tablet (a)’. 


‘But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun, 
To the right...... GatucetnseSeeesesreepeeseesorrs ato: of Ennoia 
Then must man............+. being right wary in all things. 
Hail, thou who hast suffered the Suffering. This thou hadst never suffered 

before. 
Thou art become God from Man. A kid thou art fallen into milk. 
Hail, hail to thee journeying on the right......... 
...Holy meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.’ 


The second line seems to be a fragment of a whole sentence — 
or set of sentences put for the whole, as we might put ‘ Therefore 
with Angels and Archangels,’ leaving those familiar with our 
ritual to supply the missing words. Popular quotations and 
extracts always tend to make the grammar complete or at least 
intelligible. 


1 Buvéy is the name of a Nymph, apparently a Naiad; see Roscher, s.y. 
2 Naples Museum, Kaibel, C/GIS 642. For fac-similes of this and the foll 
tablets, the text of which presents many difficulties, see Appendix, pp. 663, 


ey 
« 


XI] The Sybaris Tablets 585 


The name of the well, ‘Ennoia, depends on a conjectural 
emendation. The tablet of course cannot be the actual source of 
Dante’s Eunoé. It is, however, very unlikely that Dante invented 
the name ; he may have known of Hnnoia and modified it to Hunoia. 
It has been seen that Lethe is regarded as the equivalent of Agnoia, 
Unconsciousness, and to Agnoia Hnnoia would be a fitting 
contrast. 

The formularies that occur at the end, the ‘Suffering,’ the 
‘kid’ and the ‘ groves of Phersephoneia,’ will be considered in rela- 
tion to other and more complete tablets (p. 586). 


With the ‘ Ennoia’ tablet was found 


IV. Timpone grande tablet (b). The inscription on this 
tablet is unhappily as yet only partially read. It appears to be 
in some cryptic script. 

The broken formularies of tablet (a) and the cryptic script of 
(b) mark a stage in which the Orphic prescriptions are ceasing 
to be intelligent and intelligible, and tending to become cabalistic 
charms. Orphism shared the inevitable tendency of all mystic 
religions to lapse into mere mechanical magic. In the Cyclops of 
Euripides’, the Satyr chorus, when they want to burn out the eye 
of the Cyclops, say they know 

‘A real good incantation 


Of Orpheus, that will make the pole go round 
Of its own accord.’ 


Three tablets found near Sybaris yet remain. All these were 
found in different tombs in the same district as the Timpone 
grande tablets. In each case the tablet lay near the hand of the 
skeleton. The tombs were on the estate of Baron Compagno, who 
presented the tablets to the National Museum at Naples. In 
form of letters and in content they offer close analogies. They 
are all three reproduced in the Appendix, and will be considered 
together’. 


1 See Appendix, p. 665. 

2 Eur. Cycl. 646. 

3 Notizie degli Scavi, 1880, Tav* m1*, Figs. 1, 2, 3. With these three tablets 
was found a red-figured plate of Lucanian fabric on which was represented a winged 
genius bearing a crown. 


586 Orphic Eschatology | [ CH. : 


V. Compagno tablet (a)}. - 


‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below, 

Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal. 

For I also avow. me that I am of your blessed race, 

But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal 

ee ee Cee starflung thunderbolt. 

I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel. 

I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired. 

I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld. 

I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired. 

Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal. 
A kid I have fallen into milk.’ 


VI. Compagno tablet (b)’. 


‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of the Pure below, 

Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods and Daemons. 

For I also, I avow me, am of your blessed race. 

I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous 

Whether Fate laid me low or,..... 

with starry thunderbolt. 

But now I come a suppliant to holy Phersephoneia 

That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.’ 

VII. Compagno tablet (c)*. 

But for one or two purely verbal differences tablet (c) is pre- 
cisely the same as (b). It is written carelessly on both sides 
of the gold plate, and but for the existence of (b) could scarcely 
have been made out. Tablet (b) has itself so many omissions 
that its imterpretation depends mainly on the more complete 
contents of (a). 

The last tablet to be considered presents two features of 
special interest. First, the name of its owner Caecilia Secundina‘ 
is inscribed, and from this fact, together with the loose cursive 
script in which it is written, the tablet can be securely dated as 
of Roman times. Second, the contents show but too plainly that 
the tablet was buried with magical intent. 


VIII. Caecilia Secundina tablet. 


‘She comes from the Pure, O Pure Queen of those below 

And Eukles and Eubouleus.—Child of Zeus, receive here the armour 
Of Memory, (‘tis a gift songful among men) 

Thou Caecilia Secundina, (armour) in due rite to avert evil for ever,’ 





' Kaibel, CIGIS 641: see Appendix, p. 668. 

2 Kaibel, CIGIS 2: see Appendix, p. 669. 

% Kaibel, CIGIS 641. 8: see Appendix, p. 669. 

4 Nothing certain is known of Caecilia Secundina, though her name suggests 
connection with the family of Pliny the Younger, whose original name before his 
adoption by his uncle C. Plinius Secundus was Publius Caecilius Secundus. 


} 


1 
} 


SS ee eee 


x1] Tablet of Caecilia Secundina 587 


The tablet reads like a brief compendium from the two sets of 
formularies already given. We have the statement made to 
Despoina, Eukles and Eubouleus on behalf of Caecilia that she 
comes from the congregation of the pure, but it is not followed 
by the detailed confession of ritual performed—that is, so to speak, 
‘taken as read.’ Mention is further made of the divine origin of 
Caecilia and of Mnemosyne, but in both cases after significant 
fashion. The ‘gift of Mnemosyne’ is now not water from a well, 
but rather the tablet itself, a certificate of Caecilia’s purity, in 
verse (doidcov), and graven on imperishable gold. Caecilia claims 
divine descent not from the Orphic Zagreus but from Zeus, who 
as has already been shown (p. 480) took on, in popular monotheism, 
something of the nature and functions of Zagreus. Caecilia’s 
theology, like that of the Lower Italy vases (pp. 602, 603), is 
Orphism made orthodox, Olympicized, conventionalized. The word 
vow ‘in due rite’ seems to imply that the tablet has been ‘ certified 
and found correct’ by human authority. It is the usual priestly 
confusion : the soul 7s divine—that no Orphic priest dare deny ; and 
yet this divine soul needs the dda, the ‘armour’ forged by 
mortal hands. The concluding words aie amaywya, ‘averting 
evil for ever, make it certain that the intent is magical. The 
Orphic reverts to the spirit and the vocabulary of the old 
ritual of ‘Aversion.’ The 67)ov, the armour, is perhaps touched 
with symbolism like ‘the whole armour of God, but it is also 
in part the magic gear of the charlatan. The ‘Superstitious 
Man’ of Theophrastus’ is ‘apt to purify his house frequently, 
alleging that there has been an induction (é7raywyn) of Hecate,’ 
Caecilia Secundina brings a tablet engraved with Orphic formu- 
laries, and thereby secures means for ‘ the aversion of evil for ever,’ 


If the mutilated condition of tablet vn, the illegible character 
of Iv and the express statement of viII are evidence of the lower, 
the magical side of Orphism, the complete text of tablets v and v1 
are the expression of its highest faith, of a faith so high that it 
may be questioned whether any faith, ancient or modern, has ever 
out-passed it. 

Tablets v and vi both begin with a prayer or rather a claim 
addressed to the queen of the underworld, later defined as Pherse- 


1 Theophr. Char. xxvi1t. 


588 Orphic Eschatology [cH. 


phoneia or Despoina, and to two gods called Eukles and Eubouleus. — 
The two are manifestly different titles of the same divinity. © 
Eukles, ‘Glorious One, is only known to us from a gloss in 
Hesychius', who defines it as a euphemism for Hades. Eubouleus, 
‘He of good Counsel, the local hero and underworld divinity of 
Eleusis, the equivalent of Plouton, occurs frequently in the Orphic 
Hymns as an epithet of Dionysos’. Eukles and Eubouleus are in 
fact only titles of the one god of Orphism who appears under many 
forms, as Hades, Zagreus, Phanes and the like. The gist of this : 
monotheism will fall to be discussed when we come to the theogony — 
of Orpheus (Chap. x11.). For the present it is sufficient to state that — 
the Eukles-Eubouleus of the tablets, whom the Orphic invokes, is 
substantially the same as the Zagreus to whom the Cretan Orphic 
(p. 480) was initiated. To the names named, ie. the Queen of © 
the Underworld, Eukles and Eubouleus, the Orphic adds ‘the other 
gods and daemons. This is a somewhat magical touch. The . 
ancient worshipper was apt to end his prayer with some such 
formulary ; it was dangerous to leave any one out. The word dai- 
poves, daemons or subordinate spirits, is significant at once of the | 
lower, the magical side of Orphism, and as will be seen later (p. 656) — 
of its higher spirituality. Orphism tended rather to the worship — 
of potencies (Saiuoves) than of anthropomorphic divinities (@eo¢). 


— 


} 
The Orphic then proceeds to state the general basis of his 
claim: he is of divine birth, 


‘For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race.’ 


{ 
By this he means, as has been shewn in examining the legend | 

of Zagreus, that some portion of the god Zagreus or Eubouleus or 
whatever he be called was in him; his fathers the Titans had eaten — 
the god and he sprang from their ashes. That this is the meaning — 
of the tablets is quite clear from the words ) 
: 


‘But Fate laid me low...starflung thunderbolt.’ 


He identifies himself with the whole human race as ‘dead in 
trespasses and sins.’ If this were all, his case were hopeless ; ‘dust 
we are and unto dust we must return. He urges at the outset 
another claim, 


: 
‘Out of the pure I come.’ 
1 Hesych. s.v. Evxn\js. 


2 Orph. Hymn. xxx. 6, 7, and see Abel, Orphica s. v. 


Xt] The Ritual Formularies 589 


That is, as an Orphic I am purified by the ceremonials of the 
Orphics. He presents as it were his certificate of spiritual 
health, he is free from all contagion of evil. ‘ Bearer is certified 
pure, coming from a congregation of pure people.’ In like fashion 
in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (No. cxxv.) after the long 
negative confession made to Osiris the soul says, ‘I am pure, 
‘I am pure, ‘I am pure, ‘I am pure. He then proceeds to 
recite his creed, or rather in ancient fashion’ to confess or 
acknowledge the ritual acts he has performed. The gist of them 
each and all is, ‘Bad have I fled, better have I found,’ or as 
we should put it, ‘I have passed from death unto life.’ He does 
not himself say, I am a god—that might be overbold—but the 
answer he looks for comes clear and unmistakeable, 


‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’ 


The confession he makes of ritual acts is so instructive 
as to his convictions, so expresses his whole attitude towards 
religion that it must be examined sentence by sentence.- 

I say advisedly confession of ritwal acts, because each of the 
httle sentences describes in the past tense an action performed, 
‘I have escaped, ‘I have set my feet, ‘I have crept, ‘I have 
fallen.’ These several acts described are, I believe, statements of 
actual ritual performed on earth by the Orphic candidate for 
initiation, and in the fact that they have been performed lies his 
certainty of ultimate bliss. They are the exact counterpart of the 
ancient Eleusinian confession formularies, ‘I have fasted, I have 


drunk the kykeon’ (p. 155). 


THE RITUAL FORMULARIES. 


The first article in the creed or confession of the Orphic soul is 


Kukdov & e&érrav BapurevOéos dpyahéouo. 
‘IT have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.’ 


The notion of existence as a Wheel, a cycle of life upon life 
ceaselessly revolving, in which the soul is caught, from the tangle | 


* In magical papyri the utterance of certain ciuBoda or tokens is urged as a ’ 
plea for acceptance : ; 
vedoov é€uol, Nirouat, Tt giuBora mvoTiKa Ppatw. 


See Dieterich, Abrazas, p. 97. 


590 Orphic Eschatology [CH. 


and turmoil of which it seeks and at last finds rest, is familiar to 
us from the symbolism of Buddha. Herodotus! expressly says 
that the Egyptiaus were the first to assert that the soul of man 
was immortal, born and reborn in various incarnations, and this 
doctrine he adds was borrowed from the Egyptians by the Greeks. 
To Plato? it was already ‘an ancient doctrine that the souls of 
men that come Here are from There and that they go There 
again and come to birth from the dead.’ It was indeed a very 
ancient saying or doctrine. It has already been observed in 
discussing (p. 179) the mythology of the Keres and Tritopatores. 
Orpheus took it as he took so many ancient things that lay to his 
hand, and moralized it. Rebirth, reincarnation, became for him 
new birth. The savage logic which said that life could only come 
from life, that new souls are old souls reborn in endless succession, 
was transformed by him into a Wheel or cycle of ceaseless purga- 
tion. So long as man has not severed completely his brotherhood 
with plants and animals, not realized the distinctive marks and 
attributes of his humanity, he will say with Empedocles?: 


‘Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden, 
A bush, a bird, and a fish with scales that gleam in the ocean.’ 


To Plato the belief in the rebirth of old souls was ‘an ancient 
doctrine,’ but because the Orphics gave it a new mystical content 
the notion was for the most part fathered on Orpheus or 
Pythagoras. Diogenes Laertius*, who is concerned to glorify 
Pythagoras, said that he was the first to assert that ‘the soul 
went round in a changing Wheel of necessity, being bound down 
now in this now in that animal.’ A people who saw in a chance 
snake the soul of a hero would have no difficulty in formulating 
a doctrine of metempsychosis. They need not have borrowed it 
from Egypt, and yet it is probable that the influence of Egypt, the 
home of animal worship, helped out the doctrine by emphasizing 
the sanctity of animal life. The almost ceremonial tenderness 
shown to animals by the Pythagorean Orphics is an Egyptian 
rather than a Greek characteristic. The notion of kinship with 


1 Herod. 11. 122. . 

2 Plat. Phaedo 70 c. Plato may have had some Orphic rite vaguely in his 
mind in the Phaedrus. The soul escapes by wings from the inside of the sphere 
into heavenly places (248 c). 

3 Emped. ap. Diog. Laert. vir. 77. 4 Diog. Laert. vir. 12. 


wwii 


a 


xt] Ritual of the Wheel. 591 


the brute creation harmonized well with the somewhat elaborate 
and self-conscious humility of the Orphic. 

What precisely the ritual of the Wheel was we do not know, 
That there was an actual Wheel? in the rites and that some form 
of symbolical release was enacted is probable. It is indeed almost 
certain, as we know that Wheels formed part of the sacred 
furniture of certain sanctuaries. It is worth noting that on 
Orphic vases of Lower Italy to be discussed later (p. 600) wheels 
are suspended in the palace of Hades and Persephone, and these 
are of two kinds, solid and spoked, designed probably for quite 
different uses. The grammarian Dionysios, surnamed the Thracian, 
wrote a book on ‘The Interpretation of the Symbolism that has 
to do with Wheels, which probably contained just the necessary 
missing information. Clement? has preserved for us one valuable 
sentence which makes the ritual use of Wheels a certainty. ‘People 
signify actions,’ he says, ‘not only by words but by symbols, by 
words as in the case of the Delphic utterances “Nothing too 
much” and “ Know thyself,’ and in like manner by symbols as in 
the case of the Wheel that is turned round in the precincts of 
the gods and that was derived from the Egyptians.’ Dionysios 
is probably right. The Wheel like the Well may have come from 
Egypt, or from Egyptianized Crete. 

Hero of Alexandria* in his curious treatise on ‘Machines 
moved by air’ twice mentions Wheels as in ritual use. ‘In 
Egyptian sanctuaries there are Wheels of bronze against the 
door-posts, and they are moveable so that those who enter may 
set them in motion, because of the belief that bronze purifies; 
and there are vessels for purifying so that those who enter may 


1 The xvxXos of the rites was probably a real wheel, but it is also possible that 
it was a circle drawn round the neophyte out of which he escaped. Psellus (epi 
da.uoyvwv) records an old Bacchic rite in which demons were expelled by the action 
of leaping out of a circle of fire: upd d€ roANa KUKAW Twi TeEprypadovTes EEdNNOVTAL 
THs proyds. qv 5é Kai Toro THs Taatas Baxxelas, va uh éyw mavias wépos...6 dé ye 
KUKNos KaTtoxjs éxer Sivauw. The wheel and the magic mesmeric circle may have 
got ‘contaminated.’ 

2 Clem. Alex. Strom. v. p. 242 dia 6é cuuBddrwv, ws 6 TE Tpoxds 6 oTpedduevos év 
Tots Tov Gewy TEeuéveow eiNkuomEevos Tapa AlyuTTiwv. 

I have throughout translated kix\os by wheel. The same idea is rendered 
indifferently by tpoxés and kixdos, though k’xdos occurs more frequently: cf. Proclus 
ad Tim. p. 330 4 kikXos Tijs yevérews, év TH Tis ciuapuevyns...tpox~. The same thing 
is in English a ‘cycle,’ in American a ‘wheel.’ In the Orphic Hades of Vergil the 
kUkNos is a rota. 

% Hero Alex. Pneum. 1. 32 and 11. 32. Onoavpod karacKkevh tpoxdv exovros 
oTpepomevoy xadKeov bs Kadelrar ayyioTnpLoy. 


592 — Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


‘purify themselves. The problem is how to arrange so that when 
the Wheel is turned the water may flow mechanically so that 
as aforesaid it may be sprinkled for purifying.’ The problem which 
Hero faced mechanically the Orphics solved in metaphor—how to 
connect the Wheel with purification. It was not difficult. Bronze, 
as Hero notes, was supposed to be a purifier; in another section 
he says the Wheel was actually called Hagnisterion, the thing for 
purification. Each metal when first it comes into use 1s regarded 
as having magical properties. A resonant metal was of special 
use because it frightened away bogeys. Simaetha* in her in- 
cantations cries 


‘The goddess at the Crossways. Sound the gong,’ 


and the Scholiast on the passage remarks instructively that 
bronze was sounded at eclipses of the moon, inasmuch as it was 
held to be pure and to have the power of warding off pollutions, 
and he quotes the treatise of Apollodorus ‘Concerning the Gods’ 
as his authority for the statement that bronze was in use in all 
kinds of consecration and purification. It was appropriate to the 
dead, he adds, and at Athens the Hierophant beats a gong when 
Kore is invoked. 

Here again we have a primitive superstition ready to the hand 
of the Orphic. He is familiar with bronze-beating as a piece 
of apotropaic ritual; he sees, probably in an Egyptian temple, 
a bronze wheel known by some name that he translates as ‘a 
thing for purifying’; he has a doctrine of metempsychosis and 
an ardent longing after purification; he puts them all together 
and says with Proclus? the one salvation offered by the creator is 
that the spirit free itself from the wheel of birth. ‘This is what 
those who are initiated by Orpheus to Dionysos and Kore pray 
that they may attain, to 


“Cease from the Wheel and breathe again from ill.”’ 


The notion of escape whether from the tomb of the body, or 
from the restless Wheel or from the troubled sea, haunts the 


1 Theoer. 11. 86 schol. dudmep mpds wacav ddpoolwow Kal droxdOaprw aire éxpOvro 
ws pnot kal ’ArroANdwpos ev T@ mepl Oewy. For a full discussion of the apotropaic 
uses of bronze gongs see Mr A. B. Cook, ‘The Gong at Dodona,’ J. H. S. vol. xxm, 
1902, p. 5. 

2 Procl. in Plat. Tim. v. 330 Hs Kal of map’ ‘Oppet re Arcovicw Kal ry Képy 
Tehovpmevor TUXEW EevKovTat* 

Kvkdou 7’ at AnEae Kal avamrvedoar Kaxdryros. 





xT] Ritual of the Cirele 593 


Orphic, haunts Plato, haunts Euripides, lends him lovely meta- 
phors of a fawn escaped, makes his Bacchants sing’, 


‘Happy he, on the weary sea 

Who hath fled the tempest and won the haven. 
Happy whoso hath risen free 
Above his striving.’ 

The downward steps from purification to penance, from penance 
to vindictive punishment, were easy to take and swiftly taken. 
Plato, in the vision of Er, though he knows of purification, is not 
free from this dismal and barren eschatology of vengeance and 
retribution. On Lower Italy vases under Orphic influence, as will 
later be seen (p. 606), great Ananke, Necessity herself, is made 
to hold a scourge and behave like a Fury. That such notions 
were not alien to Orphism is clear from the line in tablet vr: 

‘I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’ 


The deeds unrighteous are not only the soul’s own personal 
sins but his hereditary taint, the ‘ancient woe’ that is his as the 
heir of the earth-born Titans. 


The next avowal is 
iweptov © éréBav oredavov tool KapraNXipouct. 
‘I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.’ 
It occurs in a second form, thus: 
ineptov & améBav orepavov mooi kapraXipo.or. 
‘I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.’ 
It is impossible to say which form is correct. It may be that both 
were indispensable, that the neophyte had to pass first into and 
then out of a ring or circle. 

The word éz8aive (I step on or over) is of course frequently 
used metaphorically with the meaning ‘I entered on, embarked 
on. It might therefore be possible to translate the words as 
‘with eager feet I entered on, i.e. I obtained, the crown I longed 
for. But as the word oréfavos means not only a crown for the 
head, but a ring or circle, a thing that encloses, it is perhaps 
better to take it here in its wider sense*. The mystic has escaped 

1 Kur. Bacch. 901. 

2 Dr Dieterich in his valuable tract De Hymnis Orphicis capitula quinque says 
(p. 55): crégpavos est qui cingit loca beatorum, vel prata illa ipsa desiderata. Simili 
notione vox oréavos usurpatur in Orphicorum Argonauticorum versu 71 

aurika of orépavos kal Telxos epuuvor 


’ Ainréw xarépawe kal ddoea. 
His interpretation suggested that given in the text, though the two are not identical. 


H. 38 


594 Orphic Eschatology [CH 


from the Wheel of Purgation, he passes with eager feet over th 
Ring or circle that includes the bliss he longs for, he enters and 
perhaps passes out of some sort of sacred enclosure. As to 
the actual rite performed we are wholly in the dark. Possibly 
the innermost shrine was garlanded about with mystic magical 
flowers. This is however pure conjecture. We know’ that the 
putting on of garlands or oréuparta was the final stage of initiation 
for Hierophants and other priests, a stage that was as it were 
Consecration and Ordination in one; but the putting on of 
garlands is not the entering of a garlanded enclosure, and it is 
the entering of an enclosure that the ‘eager feet’ seem to imply. 


Next comes the clause, 


Serroivas 8 bird KodTov evv xOovias Bacwrelas. 
‘T have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’ 


That this clause is an avowal of an actual rite performed 
admits of no doubt. It is the counterpart of the ‘token’ of the 
mysteries of the Mother: ‘I have passed down into the bridal- 
chamber, but here the symbolism seems to be rather of birth than — 
marriage. In discussing the ritual of the Semnae (p. 244), it has 
been seen that the ‘second-fated man’ had to be reborn before 
he could be admitted to the sanctuary, and the rebirth was a 
mimetic birth’. The same ceremony was gone through among 
some peoples at adoption*®. Dionysos himself in Orpbic hymns is 
called troxdXtree, ‘he who is beneath the bosom. If the rites 
are enumerated in the order of their performance this rite of birth 
or adoption must have taken place within the Circle, after the 
entrance into and before the exit from. 

In the highest grades of initiation not only was there a new 
birth but also a new name given, a beautiful custom still preserved 
in the Roman Church. Lucian+ makes Lexiphanes tell of a man 
called Deinias, who was charged with the crime of having addressed — 
the Hierophant and the Dadouchos by name, ‘and that when he 

1 Theo. Smyrn. Mathem. 1. p. 18 rerapry 5é 6 5h Kal réXos rhs éwomrelas dvddeots 
Kal oreupdrwv éridects...dadovxlas TuxdvTa 7 lepopavrias H Twos aANqs lepootvys. 

2 Hesych, s.v. devrepdmormos’ 7) 6 devrepov did yuvaixelou KéArov diadvs* ws Eos Hv 
mapa ’AOnvalos éx deurépou yevvacOa. 

> Diod. ty. 39. 

4 Lue. Lexiph. 10 cal radra eb eldws dre €& obrep WowOnoav dvavupol ré elor Kal 


ovxére dvouacrol ws ay lepwvupor Hin yeyernucvor. wowbnoav here clearly marks the 
final stage of initiation only open to priests: it is practically ‘ordination,’ 





xT] The Kid and the Milk 595 


well knew that from the time they are consecrated they are name- 
less and can no longer be named, on the supposition that they have 
from that time holy names.’ 


The last affirmation of the mystic is 
épupos es yad ererov, 
‘A kid I have fallen into milk,’ 
a sentence which occurred, it will be remembered, in the second 
person, on tablet 11. 

The quaint little formulary is simple almost to fatuity. 
Mysticism, in its attempt to utter the ineffable, often verges on 
imbecility. 

Before we attempt to determine the precise nature of the 
ritual act performed, it may be well to consider the symbolism 
of the kid and the milk. It is significant that in both cases the 
formulary occurs immediately after another statement: 


‘Thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’ 


It would seem that about the kid there is something divine. 
Eriphos according to Hesychiust was a title of Dionysos. 
Stephanus? the Byzantine says that Dionysos bore the title 
Eriphios among the Metapontians, i.e. in the very neighbour- 
hood where these Orphic tablets were engraved. It is clear 
that there was not only a Bull-Dionysos (Eiraphiotes) but a 
Kid-Dionysos (Eriphos), and this was just the sort of title that 
the Orphics would be likely to seize on and mysticize. In the 
Bacchae it has been seen (p. 446) that there seems to attach a 
sort of special sanctity to young wild things, a certain mystic 
symbolism about the fawn escaped, and the nursing mothers 
who suckle the young of wolves and deer. It may be that each 
one thought her nursling was a Baby-God. Christian children 
to this day are called Christ’s Lambs because Christ is the Lamb 
of God, and Clement? joining new and old together says: ‘ This is 
the mountain beloved of God, not the place of tragedies like 
Cithaeron but consecrated to the dramas of truth, a mount of 

1 Hesych. s.v.*Epidos: Acdvucos. 

2 Steph. Byz. s.v. Avévucos: ’Epipios rapa Meramovriots. 

* Clem. Al. Protr. x11. 119 Baxxevouor dé ev attg odx ai Deuédys THs Kepavvlas 


adekpal ai pawddes ai dvoayvov kpeavouiay jvoiuevac dd\a Tod beod Ouyarépes ai 
; \ Ps FA rit 
dyvades ai kadal Ta ceuva Tod Noyou Oeamifovrar dpyra Xopdy éyelpovoa cwppova. 


38—2 


596 Orphice Eschatology [ CH. 


sobriety shaded with the woods of purity. And there revel on it 
not the Maenads, sisters of Semele the thunderstruck, initiated in| 
the impure feast of flesh, but the daughters of God, fair Lambs 
who celebrate the holy rites of the Word, raising a sober choral 
chant.’ 

The initiated then believed himself new born as a young 
divine animal, as a kid, one of the god’s many incarnations; and 
as a kid he falls into milk. Milk was a god-given drink before 
the coming of wine, and the Epiphany of Dionysos was shown | 
not only by wine but by milk and honey?: 


‘Then streams the earth with milk, yea streams 
With wine and honey of the bee.’ 
Out on the mountain of Cithaeron he gives his Maenads 
draughts of miraculous wine, and also” 
‘If any lips 
Sought whiter draughts, with dipping finger-tips 
They pressed the sod, and gushing from “the ground 


Came springs of milk, And reed-wands lvy- -crowned 
Ran with sweet honey.’ 


The symbolism of honey, the nectar of gods and men, does not — 
here concern us, but it is curious to note how honey, used im 
ancient days to embalm the dead body, became the symbol of 
eternal bliss. A sepulchral inscription of the first century A.D. 
runs as follows*: j 





‘Here lies Boethos Muse-bedewed, undying 
Joy hath he of sweet sleep in honey lying.’ 

Boethos lies in honey, the mystic falls into milk, both are— 
symbols taken from the ancient ritual of the Nephalia and | 
mysticized. 

The question remains—what was the exact ritual of the falling — 
into milk? The ritual formulary is not vv yadda ‘1 drank milk, | 
but ésretov és yada ‘I fell into milk.’ Did the neophyte actually 
fall into* a bath of milk, or, as in the case of ‘I stepped on the 










1 Kur. Bacch. 142. 2 Eur. Bacch. 706. 

3 O. Benndorf, Grabschrift von Telmessos (Sonderabdruck aus der Festschrift 
fiir Th. Gomperz) p. 404: 

“"Ev0a Béndos dvhp jmovadpputos tarvov lave 
alévos yAuKep@ Kelwevos év médcrt.’ 

4M. Salamon Reinach (‘Une formule Orphique,’ Rev. Arch. xxxrx. 1901, 
p. 202) takes wlarew és to be metaphorical and compares incidere in and the French 
tomber sur. But the division of verb and preposition and the fact that the sentence 
is a religious formulary are against this light colloquial sense. If the expression 


| Xt] . Primitive Baptism 597 


crown I longed for, is the ritual act of drinking milk from the 
beginning metaphorically described? The question unhappily 
cannot with certainty be decided. The words ‘I fell into milk’ 
are not even exactly what we should expect if a rite of 
Baptism were described; of a rite of immersion in milk we 
have no evidence. 

It is however from primitive rites of Baptism that we get 
most light as to the general symbolism of the formulary. In the 
primitive Church the sacrament of Baptism was immediately 
followed by Communion. The custom is still preserved among 
the Copts’. The neophyte drank not only of Wine but also of a 
eup of Milk and Honey mixed’, those ‘new born in Christ’ par- 
took of the food of babes. Our Church has severed Communion 
from Baptism and lost the symbolism of Milk and Honey, nor 
does she any longer crown her neophytes after Baptism’. 

S. Jerome‘ complains in Protestant fashion that much was 
done in the Church of his days from tradition that had not really 
the sanction of Holy Writ. This tradition which the early Church 
so wisely and beautifully followed can only have come from pagan 
sources. Among the unsanctioned rites 8. Jerome mentions the 
cup of Milk and Honey. That the cup of Milk and Honey was 
pagan we know from a beautiful prescription preserved in one of 
the Magic Papyri> in which the worshipper is thus instructed: 
‘Take the honey with the milk, drink of it before the rising of 
the sun, and there shall be in thy heart something that is divine.’ 


is metaphorical it has a close analogy in rimrew és yéveow. Porphyry says (De Antr. 
Nymph. 13) of the souls éray és yéveow récwow. It may I think be worth noting 
that in Egypt, when the soles of the feet (of the mummy) which had trodden the 
mire of earth were remoyed, the gods were prayed to grant milk to the Osiris that 
he might bathe his feet in it. See Wiedemann, Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of 
Immortality, p. 48. 

1 Usener, ‘Milch und Honig,’ Rhein. Mus. 1902, Heft 2, p. 177. 

2 Tertull. de corona militis 3: dehinc ter mergitamur...unde suscepti lactis 
et mellis concordiam praegustamus. 

% For a full account of the complex and beautiful ceremony of primitive 
Baptism see Didaskaliae fragmenta Veronensia latina, ed. Ettauler (Lips. 1900), 
pp- 111—113, and E. Trumpf, dbh. d. philos.-philol. Cl. der K. Bayer. Ak. d. Wiss. 
xiv. 3, p. 180. 

4 §. Hieron. Altercat. Lucif. et orthodox. ¢. 8, t. 11, p. 180°: nam et multa alia 
quae per traditionem in ecclesiis observantur auctoritatem sibi scriptae legis 
usurpaverunt, velut in lavacro ter caput mergitare deinde egresso lactis et mellis 
praegustare concordiam. : 

° ‘Berliner Zauber-papyrus,’ Abh. d. Berl. Akad. 1865, p. 120. 20: kal \aBev 
TO oe oly TH (uéN)Te arbre mply dvarodAs Hrlov Kal ~orar Te evOcov ev TH oF 
kapola. 


598 Orphic Eschatology , [ CH. 


The milk and honey can be materialized into a future ‘happy 
land’ flowing with milk and honey, but the promise of the 
magical papyrus is the utmost possible guerdon of present 
spiritual certainty. We find in every sacrament what we bring. 


If the formularies inscribed on the tablets have been actually 
recited while the Orphic was alive we naturally ask—When and — 
at what particular Mysteries? To this question no certain answer — 
can be returned. Save for one instance, 


‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld,’ 


the formularies of the tablets bear no analogy either to the 
tokens of Eleusis or to those of the Great Mother. The Greater 
Mysteries at Eleusis were preceded, we know, by Lesser Mysteries 
celebrated at Agra!,a suburb of Athens. These mysteries were 
sacred to Dionysos and Kore rather than to Demeter, and it is 
noticeable that in the tablets there is no mention of Demeter, no 
trace of agricultural intent ; the whole gist is eschatological. But, 
found as they are in Crete and Lower Italy, it is more probable 
that these tablets refer to Orphic mysteries pure and simple 
before Orphic rites have blended with those of the Wine-God. 
Pythagoras, tradition* says, was initiated in Crete; he met there 
‘one of the Idaean Daktyls and at their hands was purified by a 
thunderbolt ; he lay from dawn outstretched face-foremost by the 
sea and by night lay near a river covered with fillets from the 
fleece of a black lamb, and he went down into the Idaean cave 4 
holding black wool and spent there the accustomed thrice nine 
hallowed days and beheld the seat bedecked every year for Zeus, 
and he engraved an inscription about the tomb with the title 
“Pythagoras to Zeus” of which the beginning is: 





“Here in death lies Zan, whom they call Zeus,” 


and after his stay in Crete he went to Italy and settled in * 
Croton.’ 
The story looks as if Pythagoras had brought to Italy from 
Crete Orphic rites in all their primitive freshness. The religion 
1 Steph. Byz. s.v. "Aypa* xwplov...mpo THs moNews ev H TA meKpa mvoTHpra emireretrat 
plunwa rev epi rov Avévucov. ‘These Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in the month 
Anthesterion sacred to Dionysos, see p. 560. For Persephone see Schol. Ar. Plut. 845 


joav dé ra pev peyddra ris Anunrpos ra dé wixpd Ileprepévys. 
* Porphyr. Vit. Pythag. 17. 





| x1] Burial among the Pythagoreans 599 


of Dionysos was not the only faith that taught man he could 
become a god. The dead Egyptian also believed that he could 
become Osiris. The Orphic in Crete and Lower Italy may have 
had rites dealing with his conduct in the next world more directly 
than those of the Great Mother or of Eleusis. 

This is made the more probable from the fact that we certainly 
know that the sect of the Pythagoreans had special burial rites, 
strictly confined to the Initiated. Of this Plutarch’ incidentally 
gives clear evidence in his discourse of ‘The Daemon of Socrates.’ 
A young Pythagorean, Lysis, came to Thebes and died there and 
was buried by his Theban friends. His ghost appeared in a dream 
to the Pythagorean friends he had left in Italy. The Pythagoreans, 
more skilled in these matters than modern psychical experts, had 
a certain sign by which they knew the apparition of a dead man 
from the phantasm of the living. They got anxious as to how 
Lysis had been buried, for ‘there is something special and sacro- 
sanct (dcvov) that takes place at the burial of the Pythagoreans 
and is peculiar to them, and if they do not attain this rite they 
think that they will fail in reaching the very happy end that is 
proper to them.’ So concerned were some of the Pythagoreans 
that they wished to have the body of Lysis disinterred and 
brought to Italy to be reburied. Accordingly one of them, 
Theanor, started for Thebes to make enquiries as to what had 
been done. He was directed by the people of the place to the 
tomb and went in the evening to offer libations, and he invoked 
the soul of Lysis to give inspired direction as to what was to be 
done. ‘As the night went on,’ Theanor recounts, ‘I saw nothing, 
but I thought I heard a voice say “Move not that which should 
not be moved,” for the body of Lysis was buried by his friends 
with sacrosanct ceremonies (ociws), and his spirit is already 
separated from it and set free into another birth, having obtained 
a share in another spirit.’ On enquiry next morning Theanor 
found that Lysis had imparted to a friend all the secret of the 
mysteries so that the funeral rites had been performed after 
Pythagorean fashion. 

What precisely the écva, the sacrosanct rites, were we cannot 

1 Plut. de Gen. Socr. xvi. ore yap Te yevouevor idia mepl Tas Tapas TOy MvOayopicdv 


Sovov ov wy TUXdvTES Ob DoKotuev améxe Td waKapioTor Kal oiketov TéNos...dclws yap brd 
tay pitwy Kexnoevoba TO Avotdos cOma. 


600 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


in detail say, but we may be tolerably sure that something special 
was done for the man who had been finally initiated, who was like © 
the Cretan mystic ocvwGets, ‘consecrated.’ This something may 
have included the burial. with his body of tablets inscribed with — 
sentences from his ‘ Book of the Dead.’ This I think is implied 
in a familiar passage of Plato. Socrates in the Phaedo} says that 
‘the journey to Hades does not seem to him a simple road like 
that described by Aeschylus in the Telephos. On the contrary it 
is neither simple nor one. If it were there would be no need of 
guides. But it appears in point of fact to have many partings of 
the ways and circuits. And this,’ he adds, ‘I say conjecturing it 
from the customary and sacrosanct (ogiwy) rites which we observe 
in this world.’ The customary rites (voucua) were for each and all ; 
the sacrosanct rites (6ova) were for the initiated only, for they only 
were sacrosanct (6cvo0c). 

The Pythagoreans we know revived the custom of burial in 
the earth, which had been at least in part superseded by the 
Northern practice of cremation. It was part of their general re- 
turn to things primitive. Earth was the kingdom of ‘ Despoina, 
@ueen of the underworld, who was more to them than Zeus of 
the: upper air. To their minds bent on symbolism burial itself ~ 
would be a consecration, they would remember that to the 
Athenians the dead were Anpntpetor?, Demeter’s people, that 
burial was refused to the traitor because he was unworthy ‘to 
be consecrated by earth*? and burial in itself may well have been 
to them as to Antigone a mystic marriage: 





‘T have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’ 


b. OrpHIc VaAsES OF LOWER ITALY. 


Orphic religion, as seen on the tablets just discussed, is singu- 
larly free from ‘other-worldliness.’ It is a religion promising, 
indeed, immortality, but instinct not so much with the hope of 
future rewards as with the ardent longing after perfect purity; it 

is concerned with the state of a soul rather than with its cireum- 
Plat. Phaedo 108 A dad ré&pv bclwy re Kal vouluwy rdv évOdde. 
Plut. de fac. in orb. lum. xxvin. 


Philostr. Her. 714 wudy yap 7d ém’ ad’r@ kipvyua’ ph yap Odwrew rov 
Tladapundnv pnié dowdy rH yz. 


1 
2 


3 


x1] Orphic Vases 601 


stances. We have the certainty of beatitude for the initiated, the 
‘seats of the blessed,’ the ‘groves of Phersephoneia,’ but the long- 
ing uttered is ecstatic, mystic not sensuous; it is summed up in 
the line: 


‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’ 


None knew better than the Orphic himself that this was only 
for the few: ‘Many are they that carry the narthex, few are they 
that are made one with Bacchus.’ For the many there remained 
other and lower beatitudes, there remained also—a thing wholly 
absent from the esoteric Orphic doctrine—the fear of punishment, 
punishment conceived not as a welcome purification, but as a fruit- 
less, endless vengeance. Of the existence of this lower faith or 
rather uwnfaith in the popular forms of Orphism we have definite 
and curious evidence from a class of vases, found in Lower Italy, 
representing scenes in the underworld and obviously designed 
under Orphic influence. 


Two specimens’ of these ‘ Apulian’ vases are given in figs. 163 
and 164. It will be obvious at the first glance that the composi- 
tion of both designs is substantially the same. This need not 
oblige us to conjecture any one great work of art of which these 
two and the other designs not figured here are copies; it only 
shows that some vase-painter of note in the 4th century B.C. con- 
ceived the scheme and it became popular in his factory. 

The main lines of both compositions are as follows: in the 
centre the palace of Hades with Plouton and Persephone. Imme- 
diately below, and also occupying a central position, is Herakles, 
carrying off Cerberus. Immediately to the left of the temple 
and therefore also fairly central, is the figure of Orpheus. About 
these central figures various groups of criminals and other denizens 
of Hades are diversely arrayed. 

With this scheme in our minds we may examine the first 
specimen, the most important of the series, because inscribed. The 
vase itself, now in the Naples Museum and usually known from the 
place where it was found as the ‘ Altamura’ vase’, is in a disastrous 

1 The whole series is published in the Wiener Vorlegebliitter, Serie x, Taf. x—vm. 
? Heydemann, Cat. 3222. Wiener Vorlegebliitter, Serie r, Taf. u. This vase 
was carefully examined by Dr Studniczka in 1887. On his report is based the 


full discussion by Dr Winkler, ‘Unter-italische Unterweltsdarstellungen,’ Breslauer 
Philolog. Abhandlungen, Band 11. Heft 5, 1888. I verified Dr Studniczka’s report 


602 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


condition. It was put together out of hundreds of fragments, 
painted over and freely restored after the fashion of the day, and 
it has never yet. been subjected to a proper chemical cleaning. 
Much therefore in the drawing remains uncertain, and only such © 
parts and inscriptions will be dealt with as are above suspicion. 
The palace of Hades, save for the suspended wheels (p. 591), | 
presents no features of interest. In the ‘Altamura’ vase many of 
its architectural features are from the hand of the restorer, but 
from the other vases the main outlines are sure. In the Altamura 
} 
; 























ee CY) Sheraton f SS = 
\ Y 
& S) A fram: ae 
= =a UF 
\ a & ie 











Fie. 163. 


vase both Hades and Persephone are seated—in the others some- 
times Persephone, sometimes Plouton occupies the throne. Had 
the designs been exclusively inspired by Orphic tradition, more 
uniform stress would probably have been laid on Persephone. 

The figure of Orpheus, common to both vases, is interesting 
from its dress, which reminds us of Vergil’s’ description, 

‘There too the Thracian priest in trailing robe.’ 

The vase-painter of the late 4th cent. B.c. was more archaeolo- 

gist than patriot. In the Lesche picture of Polygnotus, Pausanias® 


of the inscriptions in 1902. Nothing further can be done till the vase is properly 
cleaned, and, now that the Naples Museum is under new direction, this, it may be 
hoped, will be done. 

1 Verg. Aen. vi. 644. 2 Ps zy BOG: 


XI] Orpheus in Hades 603 


expressly notes that Orpheus was ‘Greek in appearance,’ and that 
neither his dress nor the covering he had on his head was Thracian. 
The Orpheus of Polygnotus must have been near akin to the 
beautiful Orpheus of the vase-painter in fig. 142. Polygnotus, 
too, made him ‘seated as it were on a sort of hill, and grasping his 
cithara with his left hand; with the other he was touching some 

























































































Fic. 164. 


sprays of willow, and he leant against a tree.’ Very different this 
from the frigid ritual priest. 


About this figure of Orpheus an amazing amount of nonsense 
has been written. The modern commentator thinks of Orpheus 
as two things—as magical musician, which he was, as passionate 
lover, which in early days he was not. The commentator’s mind 
is obsessed by ‘Che fard senza te, Eurydice?’ He asks himself 
the question, ‘Why has Orpheus descended into Hades?’ and the 
answer rises automatically, ‘To fetch Eurydice. As regards these 
Lower Italy vases there is one trifling objection to this interpreta- 
tion, and that is that there is no Eurydice. Tantalos, Sisyphos, 
Danaides, Herakles, but no Eurydice. This does not deter the 


604 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


commentator. The figure of Eurydice is ‘inferred rather than 
expressed.’ Happily this line of interpretation, which might lead 
us far, has been put an end to by the discovery of a vase in which 
Eurydice does appear ; Orpheus leads her by the wrist and a love- 
god floats above. It is evident that when the vase-painter wishes 
to ‘express’ Eurydice he does not leave her to be ‘ inferred.’ . 

It may be taken as an axiom in Greek mythology that 
passionate lovers are always late. The myth of Eurydice is of 
considerable interest, but not as a love-story. It is a piece of 
theology taken over from Dionysos, and, primarily, has nothing to 
do with Orpheus. Anyone who realizes Orpheus at all would feel 
that the intrusion of desperate emotion puts him out of key. 
Semele, the green earth, comes up from below, year by year; with 
her comes her son Dionysos, and by a certain instinct of chivalry — 
men said he had gone to fetch her. The mantle of Dionysos — 
descends on Orpheus. 

Kurydice is one of those general, adjectival names that are — 
appropriate to any and every goddess: she is the ‘ Wide-Ruler. — 
At Trozen, Pausanias* saw ‘a Temple of Artemis the Saviour, 
and in it were altars of those gods who are said to rule below © 
the earth, and they say that in this place Semele was brought 
up from Hades by Dionysos, and that here Herakles dragged 
up the hound of Hades. fPausanias is sceptical: ‘But I do_ 
not the least believe that Semele died, she who was the wife of — 
Zeus, and as to the beast called the hound of Hades, I shall state 
what I am sure is the truth about him in another place.’ The cult 
of Artemis is clearly superposed over an ancient, perhaps nameless, — 
anyhow forgotten cult of underworld gods. There was probably a 
cleft at hand and a legend of a rising Earth-goddess, as at the — 
rock of Recall, Anaklethra (p. 283), and the Smileless Rock at — 
Eleusis (p. 127); and of course, given somebody's Anodos, a Kathodos 4 

: 
" 





i sly Oe, 2 62g S 


is soon supplied, and then a formal descent into Hades. At the — 
Alcyonian lake, near Argos, which Nero tried in vain to sound, the — 
Argives told Pausanias” that Dionysos went down to Hades to i 
fetch Semele, and Polymnos, a local hero, showed him the vay 
down, and ‘there were certain rites performed there yearly. Un- 
fortunately, as is mostly the case when he comes to the real point, 4 
Pausanias found it would ‘not be pious’ to reveal these rites to 
a Ney abt coils 1 oad cohen Fh 9 a 


XI] Orpheus and Eurydice 605 


the general public. At Delphi, too, it will be remembered 
(p. 403), the Thyiades knew the mystic meaning of the festival 
of Herois, and ‘even an outsider could conjecture, Plutarch says, 
‘from what was done, that it was an upbringing of Semele.’ 

Orpheus, priest of Dionysos, took on his resurrection as well as 
his death ; that is the germ from which sprang the beautiful love- 
story. A taboo-element, common to many primitive stories, is 
easily added. You may not look back when spirits are about from 
the underworld. If you do you may have to join them. Under- 
world rites are often performed ‘without looking back’ (apera- 
otpeTTi, see p. 24 note 2). 


There is another current fallacy about these underworld vases. 
Commentators are not only prone to the romantic tendency to see 
a love-story where none is, but, having once got the magical 
musician into their minds, they see him everywhere. In these 
vases, they say, we have ‘the power of music to stay the torments 
of hell’ They remember, and small wonder, the amazing scene in 
Gluck’s opera, where Orpheus comes down into the shades playing 
on his lyre, and the clamour of hell is spell-bound; or they bethink 
them of Vergil: 


‘The very house itself, the inmost depths 
Of Death stood still to hearken,’ 

But the vase-painter of the 4th cent. B.C. is necessarily guiltless 
of Vergil as of Gluck. Moreover his work is untinged by any 
emotion, whether of poetry or religion; his composition is simply 
an onmium gatherum of conventional orthodox dwellers in Hades. 
Orpheus is there because, by that time, convention demanded his 
presence. The vase-painter’s wealthy clients—these Apulian vases 
were as expensive as they are ugly—would have been ill-pleased 
had the founder of popular mysteries not had his fitting place. But 
if interest focusses anywhere in a design so scattered and devitalized, 
it is on the obvious ‘record’ of Herakles, who, tradition said, had 
been initiated, not on the secret magic of Orpheus. It is true 
that the ‘Danaides,’ when they appear, are doing nothing but 
dangling their pitchers in attitudes meant to be decorative, but 
Tantalos still extends a hand to keep off his rock, and Sisyphos 
still uprolls the ‘pitiless’ stone; there is no pause in their 
torments. 





606 Orphic Eschatology — (cH. 


It remains to note the figures in the side groups. In the top 
row to the left are Megara and her sons, placed there by a pardon- 
able anachronism, out of compliment to Herakles and Athens. 
We should never have guessed their names, but the inscriptions 
are certain. Opposite them to the mght a group which on the 
Altamura vase is almost certainly due to restoration. The figures 
are Myrtilos, Pelops, and Hippodameia. To the left of Orpheus 
are two Poinae, developments, as has been seen (p. 231), of the 
tragic Erinyes. Above Sisyphos is another figure, a favourite of © 
the Orphics, Ananke, Necessity. Only three letters (vav) of the 
name remain, but the restoration is practically certain. Opposite 
Orpheus are the three ‘Judges’ of Hades, Triptolemos, Aiakos, — 
Rhadamanthys. Below the Judges are women bearing water-— 
vessels, to whom provisionally we may give the canonical name of — 
‘Danaides.’ The sea horse is probably due to the restorer. 


Turning to the Canosa vase, now in the Old Pinakothek at 
Munich’, we find that, though none of the figures are inscribed, 
most can easily be traced. Some modifications of the previous 
scheme must be noted. Tantalos the Phrygian takes the place of — 
the Danaides. Near Orpheus, in place of the Poinae, is a group, — 
man, wife and child, who are hard to interpret. No mythological 
figures quite suit them, and some authorities incline to see in the 
group just a human family initiated by Orpheus in his rites. In ~ 
face of the fact that all the other figures present are mythological, 
this is, I think, difficult to accept. The figures are best left 
unnamed till further evidence comes to light. On the right hand, ~ 
in the top row, is a group of great interest, Theseus, Peirithods and 
Dike, armed with a sword. 

To resume, we have as certain elements in these vases 
Orpheus, the three Judges of Hades, two heroes, Herakles and 
Theseus, who go down into Hades and return thence, two standard — 
Homeric criminals, Sisyphos and Tantalos, and, in the case of the 
Altamura vase, the Danaides. The question naturally rises, is 
there in all these figures any common factor which determines 
their selection, or is it a mere haphazard aggregate ? 

The answer is as simple as instructive, and may be stated at — 
the outset: All the canonical denizens of the underworld are hero 


1 Jahn, Cat. 849. Wiener Vorlegebliitter, Serie ©, Taf. 1. } 





x1] Tantalos 607 


and heroine figures of the older stratwm of the population. Hades 
has become a sort of decent Dower-house to which are relegated 
the divinities of extinct or dying cults. 


In discussing hero-worship, we have already seen (p. 336) that 
Tityos and Salmoneus are beings of this order. Once locally the 
rivals of Zeus, they paled before bim, and as vanquished rivals 
became typical aggressors, punished for ever as a warning to the 
faithful. Tityos does not appear on Lower Italy vases, but 
Pausanias’ saw him on the fresco of Polygnotus at Delphi, a ‘dim 
and mangled spectre,’ and Aeneas’ in the underworld says: 

‘I saw Salmoneus cruel payment make, 
For that he mocked the lightning and the thunder 
Of Jove on high.’ 

It was an ingenious theological device, or rather perhaps 
unconscious instinct, that took these ancient hero figures, really 
regnant in the world below, and made the place of their rule the 
symbol of their punishment. According to the old faith all men, 
good and bad, went below the earth, great local heroes reigned 
below as they had reigned above; byt the new faith sent its saints 
to a remote Elysium or to the upper air and made this underworld 
kingdom a place of punishment; and in that place significantly we 
find that the tortured criminals are all offenders against Olympian 
Zeus. 

We must confine our examination to the two typical instances 
selected by the vase-painter, Sisyphos and Tantalos. 

We are apt to think of Sisyphos and Tantalos as punished for 
overweening pride and insolence, and to regard their downfall as a 
warning of the ephemeral nature of earthly prosperity. 


‘Oh what are wealth and power! Tantalus 
And Sisyphus were kings long years ago, 
And now they lie in the lake dolorous; 
The hills of hell are noisy with_their woe, 
Aye swift the tides of empire ‘ebb and flow.’ 

Kings they were, but kings of the old discredited order. Homer 
says nothing of their crime, he takes it as known; but in dim local 
legends we can in both cases track out the real gist of their 
ill-doing: they were rebels against Zeus. 


This is fairly clear in the case of Tantalos. According to one 


Wal Date ea-43 aa 2 Verg. den. yi. 585. 


608 Orphic Eschatology — [cH. 


legend! he suffered because he either. stole or concealed for 

Pandareos the golden hound of Zeus. According to the epic 

author? of the ‘Return of the Atreidae, he had been admitted to— 
feast with the gods, and Zeus promised to grant him whatever 
boon he desired. ‘He, Athenaeus says, ‘being a man insatiable in | 
his desire for enjoyment, asked that he might have eternal re- 

membrance of his joys and live after the same fashion as the gods.” 
Zeus was angry; he kept his promise, but added the torment of 
the imminent stone. It is clear that in some fashion Tantalos, 
the old hero-king, tried to make himself the equal of the new 

Olympians. The insatiable lust is added as a later justification 

of the vengeance. Tantalos is a real king, with a real grave. 

Pausanias® says, ‘In my country there are still signs left that 
Pelops and Tantalos once dwelt there. There is a famous grave of 
Tantalos, and there is a lake called by his name. The grave, he 

says elsewhere‘, he had himself seen in Mount Sipylos, and ‘ well 

worth seeing it was. He mentions no cult, but a grave so note- 

worthy would not be left untended. 


The legend of Sisyphos, if-more obscure than that of Tantalos, 
is not less instructive. The Ziad knows of Sisyphos as an ancient 
king. When Glaukos would tell his lineage to Diomede he says’: 

‘A city Ephyre there was in Argos’ midmost glen 
Horse-rearing, there dwelt Sisyphos the craftiest of all men, 


Sisyphos son of Aiolos, and Glaukos was his son, 
And Glaukos had for offspring blameless Bellerophon.’ 


Ephyre is the ancient name of Corinth, and on Corinth 
Pausanias® in his discussion of the district has a highly significant 
note. He says, ‘I do not know that anyone save the majority 
of the Corinthians themselves has ever seriously asserted that 
Corinthos was the son of Zeus.’ He goes on to say that according 
to Eumelus (cire. B.c. 750), the ‘first inhabitant of the land was 
Ephyra, daughter of Okeanos. The meaning is transparent. An 
ancient pre-Achaean city, with an eponymous hero, a later attempt 
—discredited of all but the interested inhabitants—to affiliate the 


4 


1 Schol. ad Pind. Ol. 1. 89. 

2 Athen. vir, 14 § 281. The sources for the punishment of Tantalos are fully” 
collected by Dr Frazer ad Paus. x, 31. 

JS Gy ee 4 Pp, 1. 22, 8. 7 

5 Hom. Il. vr. 152. So Piva loth 





a 
— 


-Xxti] Sisyphos _ GOS 


indigenous stock to the immigrant conquerors by a new eponymous 
hero, a son of Zeus. 

) The epithet ‘craftiest,’ «épdicros, is, as Kustathius’ observes, a 
‘mid-way expression,’ i.e. for better for worse. ‘Glaukos,’ he says 
in his observant way, ‘does not wish to speak evil of his ancestor.’ 
The word he uses means very clever (auvertmtaros), very ready 
and versatile (evtpeyéoratos). It is in fact no more an epithet 
of blame than zodvuntis, ‘ of many wiles, the stock epithet of 
Odysseus. Eustathius goes on to explain the meaning of the name 
Sisyphos. Sisyphos, he says, was among the ancients a word of 
the same significance as Gedcogos, divinely wise, ovos being among 
the Peloponnesians a form of @eds. He cites the oath used by 
comic poets, val T@® o1w for vn Tods Peovs, ‘by the gods. Whether 
Eustathius is right, and Sisyphos means ‘ divinely wise,’ or whether 
we adopt the current etymology” and make Sisyphos a redupli- 
cated form of codds, 1.e. the ‘ Very Very Wise One, thus much is 
clear. The title was traditionally understood as of praise rather 
than blame, and it is not rash to see in it one of the cultus epithets 
of the old religion like ‘The Blameless One.’ 

It is as a benefactor that Sisyphos appears in local legend. It 
was Sisyphos, Pausanias* says, who found the child Melicertes, 
buried him, and instituted in his honour the Isthmian games. It 
was to Sisyphos that Asopos‘ gave the fountain behind the temple 
of Aphrodite, and for a reason most significant. ‘Sisyphos,’ the 
story says, ‘knew that it was Zeus who had carried off Aegina, 
the daughter of Asopos, but he would not tell till the spring on 
Acrocorinthus was given him. Asopos gave it him, and then he 
gave information, and for that information he,if you like to believe 
it, paid the penalty in Hades.’ Pausanias is manifestly sceptical, 
but his story touches the real truth. Sisyphos is the ally of the 
indigenous river Asopos. Zeus carries off the daughter of the 
neighbouring land; Sisyphos, hostile to the conqueror, gave in- 
formation, and for that hostility he suffers in Hades. But though 
he points a moral in Olympian eschatology, he remains a great 
local power. The stronghold of the lower city bore his name, the 
Sisypheion. Diodorus’ relates how it was besieged by Demetrius, 


1 Kustath. ad J. vr. 153, 631 and ad Od. xt. 592, 1702. 
? By substitution of the Aeolic v for 0. See Vaniéek, Etym. Wérterbuch, p. 592. 
Sees. 1.3. oo UPL ing, Bade >| Diod. xx. 103: 


H. 39 


610 Orphic Eschatology [cH 


and when it was taken the garrison surrendered. It must have 
been a place of the old type, half fortress half sanctuary. Strabo* 
notes that in his day extensive ruins of white marble remained, 
and he is in doubt whether to call it temple or palace. 

As to the particular punishment selected for Sisyphos, a word 
remains to be said. It bears no relation to his supposed offence, 
whether that offence be the cheating of Death or the betrayal of 
Zeus. His doom is ceaselessly to upheave a stone. Reluctant 
though I am to resort to sun-myths, it seems that here the sun” 
counts for something. The sun was regarded by the sceptical 
as a large red-hot stone: its rising and setting might very fitly be 
represented as the heaving of such a stone up the steep of heaven, 
whence it eternally rolls back. The worship of Helios was esta- 
blished at Corinth’; whether it was due to Oriental immigration 
or to some pre-Hellenic stratum of population cannot here be 
determined. Sisyphos was a real king, the place of his sepulture— 
on the Isthmus was known only to a few. It may have been kept_ 
secret like that of Neleus’® for prophylactic purposes. But a real_ 
king may and often does take on some of the features and func- 
tions of a nature god*. 










On the ‘ Canosa’ vase, immediately above Tantalos, is a group» 
of three Judges, carrying sceptres. On the Altamura vase are 
also three Judges, occupying the same place in the composition, . 
and happily they are inscribed—Triptolemos, Aiakos, and Rhada- 
manthys. Two of the three, Triptolemos and Aiakos, certainly ” 
belong to the earlier stratum. 

Triptolemos had never even the shadowiest connection with: 
any Olympian system; there is no attempt to affiliate him; he- 
ends as he began, the foster-child of Demeter and Kore, and by 
virtue of his connection with the ‘Two Goddesses’ of the under-- 
world he reigns below. Demeter and Kore, the ancient Mother: 
and Maid, were strong enough to withstand, nay to out-top, any 


: 


1 Strab. ea 21 § 379. 


aE elie Onel. SP It. as ae 

4 My Pee object is not to discuss the origin of the particular forms 0 7 
punishment inflicted in Hades, but it may be noted in passing that the stone” 
overhanging Tantalos and the lake in which he is submerged may have contained 
a reminiscence of some natural precipice and actual catastrophe, see Eustath. ad_ 
Od. x1. 592, 1701. In the Aeneid (v1. 601) the Lapithae, Ixion and Peirithods 
alike suffer the penalty of the imminent stone. 


x1] The Judges of Hades 611 


number of Olympian divinities. To tamper with the genealogy of 
their local hero was felt to be useless and never attempted. 

In striking contrast to Triptolemos, Aiakos seems at first sight 
entirely of the later stratum. He is father of the great Homeric 
heroes, Telamon and Peleus, and when a drought afflicts Greece it 
is he who by sacrifice and prayer to Pan-Hellenian Zeus procures 
the needful rain. Recent investigation’ has, however, clearly 
shown that Aiakos is but one of the countless heroes taken over, 
affiliated by the new religion, and his cult, though overshadowed, 
was never quite extinguished. One fact alone suffices to prove 
this. Pausanias’ saw and described a sanctuary in Aegina known 
as the Aiakeion. ‘It stood in the most conspicuous part of the 
city, and consisted of a quadrangular precinct of white marble. 
Within the precinct grew ancient olives, and there was there also 
an altar rising only a little way from the ground, and it was said, 
as a secret not to be divulged, that this altar was the tomb of 
Aiakos. The altar-tomb was probably of the form already dis- 
cussed (p. 63) and seen in fig. 9. Such a tomb, as altar, presupposes 
the cult of a hero. 

Minos does not appear on these Lower Italy vases. In his 
place is Rhadamanthys, his brother and like him a Cretan. The 
reason of the substitution is perhaps not far to seek. Eustathius® 
notes that some authorities held that Minos was a pirate and others 
that he was just and a lawgiver. It is not hard to see to which 
school of thinkers the Athenians would be apt to belong, and the 
Lower Italy vases are manifestly under Attic influence. If the old 
Cretan tradition had to be embodied, Rhadamanthys was a safe 
non-committal figure. He is most at home in the Elysian fields, 
a conception that was foreign to the old order. As brother of 
Minos, Rhadamanthys must have belonged to the old Pelasgian 
dark-haired stock, but we find with some surprise that he is in 
the Odyssey ‘golden-haired’ (£av@0s), like any other Achaean. 
Eustathius hits the mark when he says‘, ‘Rhadamanthys is golden- 
haired, out of compliment to Menelaos, for Menelaos had golden 
hair.’ 

Herakles and Theseus remain, and need not long detain us. 


1 W. M. L. Hutchinson, Aeacus, a Judge of the Underworld, p. 25. 

Seb. 11.129... 6: 3 Kustath. ad Il. xtv. 321, 989. 

4 Eustath. ad Od. tv. 564, 187 7d dé EavOos ‘PadduavOus mpds ndoviyv Meveddw 
méppacrat, EavOos yap kal avros. 


39—2 


612 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


Herakles is obviously no permanent denizen of Hades; he is 
triumphant, not tortured; he hales Cerberus to the upper air, and 
that there may be no mistake Hermes points the way. It has 
already been seen (p. 55) that Herakles was a hero, the hero well 
worth Olympianizing though he never became quite Olympianized. 
In the Nekuia, when the poet is describing Herakles, he is caught 
on the horns of a dilemma between the old and the new faith, 
and instinctively he betrays his predicament. Odysseus’ says: 

‘Next Herakles’ great strength I looked upon, 

His shadow, for the man himself is gone 


To jom him with the gods immortal; there 
He feasts and hath for bride Hebe the fair,’ 


The case of Theseus is different. In the Hades of Vergil’ 
he is a criminal condemned for ever: 

‘There sits, and to eternity shall sit, 
Unhappy Theseus.’ 

But on these Lower Italy vases we have again to reckon with — 
Athenian influence. Theseus is of the old order, son of Poseidon, 
but Athens was never fully Olympianized, and she will not have 
her hero in disgrace. Had he not a sanctuary at Athens, an — 
ancient asylum®? Were not his bones brought in solemn pomp 
from Skyros*? So the matter is adjusted with considerable tact. 
Theseus, never accounted as guilty as Peirithods, is suffered to return 
to the upper air, Peirithods has to remain below; and this satisfies 
Justice, Dike, the woman seated by his side. That the woman 
holding the sword is none other than Dike herself is happily 
certain, for she appears inscribed on the fragment of another and 
similar amphora in the Museum at Carlsruhe®. Near her on this’ 
fragment is Peirithods, also inscribed. 

So far in our consideration of the criminals of Hades it might 
seem as though they owed their existence purely to theological 
animus. They are, we have seen, figures of the old religion 
degraded by the new. But to suppose that this was the sole clue 
to their presence would be a grave mistake. The notion 0 
punishment, and especially eternal punishment, cannot be fairly 
charged to the account of Homer and the Olympian religion 

1 Hom. Od. xr. 601. 2 Verg. Aen. vi. 617. 

3 Pp. 1.17. 2, and Ar, Hq. 1311 schol. ad loc. «PS TIS. 


5 Cat. 258. Hartung, Arch. Zeit. p. 263, Taf. xrx. and Wiener Vorlegeblitter 
Serie £, Taf. v1. 3. 





x1] Dike in Hades 613 


ke represents. This religion was too easy-going, too essentially 
aristocratic to provide an eternity even of torture for the religious 
figures it degraded and despised. Enough for it if they were 
carelessly banished to their own proper kingdom, the underworld. 
It is, alas, to the Orphics, not to the Achaeans, that religion owes 
the dark disgrace of a doctrine of eternal punishment. The Orphics 
were concerned, as has fully been seen, with two things, immor- 
tality and purification ; the two notions to them were inseparable, 
but by an easy descent the pains that were for purification became 
for vengeance. The germ of such a doctrine is already in the line: 


‘IT have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’ 


The lower kind of Orphie could not rid of vengeance the Hades 
he made in his own vindictive image. We have seen (p. 507) the 
heights to which Dike could rise as Heavenly Justice, as Purity ; 
here in Hades she descends to another and more human level. 

The figure of Dike in art was not invented by the artist of the 
Lower Italy vases. She is 






quaintly figured in the design 
in fig. 165, from an amphora 
in the Museum at Vienna’. 
Dike, with uplifted mallet, is 


about_to pound the head_of 


an ugly speckled woman, 
Adikia, Injustice. The vase, 
though not signed by Niko- 
sthenes, is manifestly of bis 
school, and therefore dates 
about the turn of the 6th and 
5th centuries B.c. The figure 
of Dike smiting with the 
mallet or club was familiar 
to literature. Theseus, when 
he learns the death of Hippo- 
lytos, asks: 





Fre. 165. 


‘How then did Justice smite him with her club, 
My son who shamed me?’ 


1 Cat. 319. Masner, p. 39, fig. 22. 


614 Orphic Eschatology [cH. 


The Hades, then, of the Lower Italy vases is a popular blend of 
Orphism and of Olympian theology, or rather of ancient Pelasgian 
figures viewed through the medium of Olympianism. The old 
stratum provides the material, the new stratum degrades it, and 
Orphism moralises it. 










THE DANAIDES. 


We have left to the end the figures of the ‘ Danaides, the 
maiden-figures carrying water-jars, who on the Altamura vase’ 
stand in the lowest row on the right hand. The ‘Danaides’ have — 
been reserved advisedly, because in their case we have positive 
evidence of the blend between new and old. j 

When mention is made of the water-carriers in Hades, maidens — 
who carry water in a leaky vessel, to the modern mind the name | 
‘Danaides’ instantly occurs : ’ 


aed came ee 


‘O Danaides, O sieve.’ 


The association is real and valid, but its cause and origin haveg 
been misunderstood, and thereby much confusion has arisen. 

The water-carriers of Hades are familiar to us mainly through 
the famous attack made by Plato* in the Republic on Oxphidl 
eschatology. Seizing, according to his fashion, on the lower side of ‘ 
Orphism, Plato complains that it is riddled through and through 
with other-worldliness. Homer and Hesiod promise to the just 
man good in this life, ‘bees’ and ‘woolly sheep,’ and ‘trees laden 
with fruit, and ‘wealthy marriages’ and ‘high offices. That in 
Plato’s eyes is bad enough, but religious poets, among them 
Orpheus, do worse. ‘Still more lusty are the blessings that 
Musaeus and his son give on behalf of the gods to the just, for 
on their showing they take them down into Hades and set them 
on couches and prepare a Banquet of the Blest; they crown 
them with garlands and make them spend their whole time being” 
drunk, accounting eternal drunkenness to be the fairest reward of 
virtue; and others lengthen out still longer the recompense given 
by the gods, saying that. there shall be children’s children and 





1 In a vase in the Museum at Carlsrue. (Cat. 388) one ‘ Danaid’ appears in the- 
second tier of figures, see Winkler, Darstellungen der Unterwelt, p. 13. 
* Plat. Rep. 363 p and x. 





: x1] The Danaides 615 


a posterity of the blessed and those who keep faith. In such and 
the like fashion do they sing the praise of justice. But the 
impious and unjust they bury in a kind of mud in Hades, and 
compel them to carry water in a sieve.’ 

The ‘immortal drunkenness’ promised as guerdon to the 
blessed was of course conceived of by the higher sort of Orphic 
as a spiritual ecstasy, by the lower Orphic as merely eternal 
banqueting. The notion was easily popularized, for the germ of 
it existed in the ‘ Hero-feast’ already discussed (p. 350), and these 
‘Hero-feasts, we have seen, were taken over by Dionysos. 


The mud and the sieve to which the impious were condemned 
remain to be considered. They can only be understood in relation 
to Orphic ritual, and in this relation are instantly clear. Daubing 
with mud was, we have seen (p. 492), an integral rite in certain 
Orphic mysteries. The rite neglected on earth by the impious 
must be performed for ever in Hades. The like notion les at the 
| bottom of the water-carrying. He who did not purify himself on 
_ earth by initiation must for ever purify himself in Hades. But 
the vindictive instinct, always alive in man, adds, it is too late, he 
carries water in a pierced vessel, a sieve, and carries it for ever. 

It is often said by modern commentators who have made no 
trial of eternal burning that fruitless labour is the greatest of all 
punishments. Goethe was the first offender. ‘The ancients,’ he 
says, ‘rightly considered fruitless labour as the greatest of all 
torments, and the punishments which Tantalos, Sisyphos, the 
Danaides and the Uninitiated undergo in Hades bear witness to 
this.” But it is not in this reflective fashion that primitive 
| mythology and eschatology are made. 

The word used by Plato for those who carry the water in the 

sieve is noteworthy, it is axocvov, which perhaps is best translated 
_‘unconsecrated ones. The word 6écvo. we have already seen 
denoted complete initiation, the full and final stage; avoccos is 
almost, though not quite, ‘uninitiated. In the Phaedo, Plato does 
not mention the water-carriers, but he says explicitly what he 
here implies, that those who lie in mud are those uninitiated in 
the mysteries. ‘I think, says Socrates, ‘that those who founded 
our mysteries were not altogether foolish, but from old had a 
hidden meaning when they said that whoso goes to Hades un- 
































616 Orphic Eschatology [ CH 


initiated (auvnros), and not having finally accomplished the rites 
(atéXeoTos), will lie in mud.’ 

Again, when in the Gorgias Plato’ notes the moralization of 
the notion of the water-carrying, he quite clearly states that the 
water-carriers are the uninitiated. Socrates is refuting the notion 
propounded by Callicles that the full satisfaction of the passions is 
virtue. ‘You make of life a fearful thing, he says, and I think © 
perhaps Euripides was right when he said: . 


‘Life may be death, death life—who knows ?’ 


‘A certain philosopher,’ he goes on, ‘has said we are dead, and 
that the body (cdua) is a tomb (o7jua). This doctrine, it will be 
remembered, was fathered in the Cratylus on the Orphics. Then 
with the notion of the tomb-body (c@ua o7jpa) still in his mind, 
Socrates continues: ‘A certain ingenious man, probably an Italian ~ 
or a Sicilian, playing on the word, invented a myth in which he 
called that part of the soul which is the seat of the desires a 
pithos, because it was bidable (wi@avov) and persuadable, and he 
called the ignorant “unshutting” (auuyrovs)...and he declared 
that of the souls in Hades the uninitiated were most miserable, © 
for they carry water into a pithos which is pierced, with a sieve 
that is pierced in like manner’ Whether the ‘ingenious man’ 
was Empedocles or Pythagoras is not for our purpose important; 
both held Orphic doctrines, and one of these doctrines was that 
the uninitiated carried water in Hades. It has not, I think, been 
noticed that the tomb (oa) as a symbol of the body evidently 
suggests the pithos or jar as symbol of the seat of the desires. 
We have seen in discussing the Anthesteria (p. 43) that the souls 
rise from a grave-pithos. 
_ So far it must be distinctly noted that Plato nowhere calls the 

water-carriers in Hades Danaides. The first literary source for 
the Danaides as water-carriers in Hades is the pseudo-Platonic 
dialogue the Aaiochus*. In Hades, we are there told, is the region 
of the unholy (yaépos doe8dv) and the ‘unaccomplished water- 
carryings of the Danaides’ (Aavaidwv bdpeta atedeis). The word 
ateXets, ‘unaccomplished, means also uninitiated, and we are left — 
in doubt—a doubt probably intentional, as to which meaning is 

1 Plat. Gorg. 493. 


2 Ps.-Plat. Avioch. 573 n. In Xenophon (Oec. vit. 40) the water-carriers ar 
unnamed and masculine: ol els Tov rerpnuévov mlfov avrdew eydmevot. 


x1] The Danaides 617 


here proposed. The whole purport of the Awiochus is to prepare a 
coward to face death decently, and the dialogue is full of mysticism. 
We have as the meed of the blessed ‘ flowery meadows,’ streams of 
‘pure water,’ ‘drinking feasts with songs, and the like. Moreover 
and most significant of all, the uninitiated have ‘some sort of 
proedria’ or right of the first place, and even in Hades they ‘go on 
performing their pure and sanctified rites. It is the very mirror 
of the heaven where 


‘Congregations ne’er break up and Sabbaths have no end.’ 


To Plato, then, the water-carriers of Hades are ‘ uninitiated’; 
by the time of the Awiochus they are Danaides: what is the con- 
necting link? The answer must wait till the evidence of art has 
been examined. 

The evidence of vase-painting is of high importance, because 
we possess two black-figured vases which antedate Plato by 
more than a century. The design in fig. 166 is from an amphora 


SW), 


ps r}F pz 
KE, (Ee 
Ss P; [z 
LER A) f zB 


Z 
(2X 





Fic. 166. 


in the old Pinakothek’ in Munich. ‘The scene is laid in the 
underworld; of that we are sure from the figure of Sisyphos. 
On the reverse of the vase (not figured here) Herakles is repre- 
sented with Cerberus. On the obverse (fig. 166), four little winged 
eidolu (ghosts) are climbing carefully up a huge pithos, and into it 
they pour water from their water-jars. The pithos, it should be 
noted, is sunk deep into the earth; it is in intent the mouth of a 
well. Such pzthoz are still to be found sunk in the earth at Athens, 
and served the Turks for cisterns. The upper part of the pithos is 
intact, so are the water-jars, but it is possible and indeed almost 


1 Jahn, Cat. 153. Baumeister 1. 866. 


618 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. 


certain that the pithos is thought of as pierced at the bottom so 
that the water poured in flows away into the ground: . 
E ‘inane lymphae 
dolium fundo pereuntis imo.’ 

The vase in fig. 166 is usually figured as an illustration of the 
‘Danaid’ myth, but there is not the faintest adducible evidence — 
that the winged eidola are Danaides. 

The design in fig. 167, from a black-figured lekythos in the 
museum at Palermo’, allows us to go a step further. The water- 





Fic. 167. 


carriers are emphatically not Danaides. Of the six figures who — 
rush in grotesque hurry to fill the pithos, three are men, three 
women. If we give them a name, it must be not Danaides but 
‘Uninitiated.’ They are burlesqued, in the spirit of Aristophanes ; 
the uninitiated soul pauses to refresh his mind by pulling the 
donkey’s tail. The donkey, it may be noted, is further evidence 
that the vase-painter has the mysteries in his mind. He has fallen 
on his knees, and his burden has dropped from his back.” The 
seated old man gazes at it helplessly. There seems a reminiscence 
of the ‘ass who carried the mysteries, and in this topsy-turvy 
Hades, as in Aristophanes, he turns and will carry them no more. 
The ass and the old man, sometimes called Oknos, are stock 
figures in the comic Hades, and they are variously moralized. The 
closest literary analogy to our picture is offered centuries later by 
Apuleius*. Psyche, when about to descend into the lower world, 


1 Arch. Zeit. 1871, Taf. 31. The objects in front of the seated old man are 
apparently a collection of loose sticks. I had doubts as to the accuracy of the 
reproduction, but the original at Palermo was examined for me by the late — 
Mr R. A. Neil, and he pronounced the reproduction substantially correct. 

2 Apul. Met. v1. 18. Prof. Furtwiingler was, I believe, the first to call attention 
to the passage of Apuleius in connection with this vase. See Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1890, — 
Anz. p. 24, and for the whole question of Oknos, which does not here immediately 
concern us, see O. Rossbach, ‘Diimonen der Unterwelt,’ Rhein. Mus. 1893, p. 593. { 

L) 


; 


x1] The Danaides 619 


is warned that when she has gone some distance on the ‘deadly 
way’ she will come upon a lame ass and a lame ass-driver. The 
driver will ask her to pick up for him some of the bundles that 
have fallen from the ass’s pack. She is to remain silent and 
pass on. 

It is of course matter for regret that neither of the black- 
figured vases that we possess is inscribed. It would have been 
most instructive to learn what that echo of popular tradition, the 
vase-painter, actually called the water-carriers. Happily we have, 
not indeed a work of art itself, but the literary record of such 
a work in which an inscription did occur—the painting by 
Polygnotus of the descent of Odysseus into Hades, frescoed on 
the wall of the Lesche of Delphi, and minutely described by 
Pausanias. 

‘Above the figure of Penthesilea, Pausanias" says, ‘are women 
carrying water in broken earthen sherds.’ The vessels are here 
described as broken, not pierced,and Pausanias says nothing about 
whether the vessel into which they pour is pierced or not. ‘One 
of the women is represented as in the flower of her youth, the 
other of advanced years.’ There were certainly no old Danaides. 
‘There is no separate inscription over each woman, but there is an 
inscription common to both which says they are ‘of those who 
have not been initiated’ Pausanias then goes on to describe some 
other mythological figures unconnected with these women, among 
them Sisyphos, who is ‘struggling to push a rock up a precipice.’ 
He then adds, ‘ There is also in the picture a pithos and an elderly 
man, a boy and two women, one just below the rock, who is young, 
and near to the old man a woman of similar age. The others are 
going on carrying water, but the old woman seems to have broken 
her hydria, but what is left in the potsherd she is pouring into the 
pithos. As in the black-figured vase-paintings it is a hydrophoria 
into a pithos, but the hydriae are in some cases at least broken. 
How many figures in all Pausanias saw is not clear, owing to his 
disjointed account, nor does it matter, the essential thing is that 
they are of both sexes and any age—they are nowise Danaides. 
Nor did Pausanias, charged though he was with later mythological 
associations, suppose them to be so—that the inscription forbade. 
He concludes his account thus: ‘We inferred that these also 


1p. x. 31. 9—11. 


620 Orphic Eschatology [ CH. | 







(i.e. the last group mentioned by him) were persons who held the 
rites at Eleusis to be of no account. For the Greeks of early days” 
held initiation at Eleusis to be of as much more account than any 
other matter as the gods are compared to the heroes.’ 

Polygnotus and Plato certainly, the black-figured vase-painter 
probably, regarded the water-carriers of Hades not as mythical 
Danaides, but as real human persons uninitiated. By the date of 
the Axiochus the fruitless water-carriers are Danaides. The ques- 
tion still remains to be answered, Why are the Danaides selected 
as typically Uninitiate? It was, it must be noted, perfectly 
natural that popular theology, when it made of the Uninitiate 
water-carriers in Hades, should seek a mythical prototype, but 
why were the Danaides selected ? The reason is primarily simple 
and obvious, though later it became curiously complex. 

The Danaides of mythology were well-nymphs. One of the 
sisterhood was called Amymone: she gave her name to the spring 
near Lerna, still called in Strabo’s time Amymone. Strabo* pre- 
serves for us a line from an epic poet, 


‘ Argos, waterless once, the Danai made well-watered.’ 


Long before the tragedy about their husbands, the Danaides 
were at work watering, fertilizing thirsty Argos. The Danaides, 
as merely Danaides, might fitly be represented as filling a great 
well-pithos. 

But, it must next be observed, the Danaides belong to the» 
old stratum of the population, the same stratum as Tantalos, as: 
Sisyphos, as Tityos: they are of the old matriarchal order, their: 
prayer persistently iterated is: 

‘We, the great seed of a Holy Mother, ah me! 
Grant us that we 
Unwed, unsubdued, from marriage of men may flee®.’ 

In the Suppliants of Aeschylus it is from a marriage they deem) 
lawless that the Danaides flee, and their act is justified. Behind | 
the legend we seem to discern, though dimly, the reflection of some _ 
shift of old to new, some transition from matriarchal freedom to - 
patriarchal marriage enactments. In any case, in the late orthodox 

1 Strab. virt. § 256. Eustathius ad Jl, rv. 171. 351 attributes the verse in_ 
slightly different form to Hesiod: 7 cal dwd r&v Aavatéwy al mapayerduevar & 
Alyurrouv ppewpuxlav édtdatay ws ‘Holodos 


"Apyos dvudpov édy Aavads troinoev évudpov. : 
2 Aesch. Supp. 158. 


| XI] The Danaides 621 


_ferm of the myth, we meet the Danaides as criminals, and their 
crime is clearly not only that of murder, but of rejection of 
marriage. What was justified by the old order was criminal in 
the new. Here was an opportunity for the moralist. Of old 
the Danaides carried water because they were well-nymphs; the 
new order has made them criminals, and it makes of their 
fruitful water-carrying a fruitless punishment—an atonement for 
murder’. 

It will readily be seen that the well-nymphs, regarded by the 
new order as guilty maidens seeking purification, offered just the 
mythological prototype needed for the uninitiated water-carriers. 
Once the analogy was seized, many further traits of resemblance 
would eagerly be added. At the lake of Lerna, near which 
was the spring known as Amymone, expiatory purifications were, 
Strabo* tells us, actually performed. Hence, he says, arose the 
expression ‘a Lerna of ills. It was the custom no doubt at 
Lerna as in many another swamp and lake to bury ‘purifications’ 
(ka@appata). Such rites of the old order were the ‘mysteries’ 
of primitive religion. Herodotus® expressly tells us that it was 
the Danaides who taught to the Pelasgian women the sacred 
rites of Demeter, which the Greeks called Thesmophoria, and 
of which Herodotus dares not disclose the full details. The 
Danaides, who later became types of the Uninitiated, were, it 
would seem, the prime Initiators. So does theology shift. 


Another ritual fact helped out the fusion and confusion. 
To the Roman Church marriage is a sacrament, to the Anglican 
still ‘an excellent mystery. In lke fashion to the Greeks 
marriage was conceived of as a rite of initiation, and through 
initiation of consummation ; the word 7é)y in its plural form was 
used of all mysteries, the singular form was expressly applied to 
marriage. Pollux‘, in discussing wedding ceremonies, says, ‘and 


1 The story that the heads of the murdered husbands were buried in or near 
Lerna apart from their bodies may have been merely aetiological and based on the 
practice of calling the brim of a well kedad7. Cf. our ‘ well-head,’ ‘ fountain-head.’ 
Latin caput aquae. It is not my purpose here to examine completely the Danaid 
myth save in so far as the Danaides were contaminated with the Uninitiated in 
Hades. The folklore of the subject has been well collected by Dr Campbell Bonner, 
Trans. American Philol. Ass. vol. xxxt. 1900, 11. p. 27. 

2 Strab. loc. cit. supra. 3 Herod. 11. 171. 

4 Poll. On. 111. 38 Kai réNos 6 ydmos Exadetro kal TédeLoe of yeyaunkébres dtd TOOTO Kal 
“Hoa terela 4 Svyia. The play on the word réXos cannot be reproduced in English. 





622  Orphie Eschatology [cH 


marriage is called 7éos, i.e. a rite that completes, and those who 
have been married are called complete, and on this account the 
Hera of marriage is called Teleia, the Complete One.’ It has 
already been seen (p. 533) that one special rite of purification, the 7 
Liknophoria, was common to marriage and the mysteries. The 
same is true of the Loutrophoria, carrying of the bath. Is itm 
surprising that in the figures of the well-nymphs some ingenious 
person saw the Danaides as atede?s yapou, ‘uninitiated in 
marriage, and therefore condemned to carry for ever in vain the 
water for their bridal bath in Hades? The more soas, if we may 
trust Eustathius’, it was the custom to place ‘on the grave of — 
those who died unmarried a water jar called Lowtrophoros? im — 
token that the dead had died unbathed and without offspring. — 
Probably these vases, as Dr Frazer* suggests, were at first placed — 
on the graves of the unmarried with the kindly intent of helping | 
the desolate unmarried ghost to accomplish his wedding in the : 
world below. But once the custom fixed, it might easily be 
interpreted as the symbol of an underworld punishment. 

Some versions of the story say that the water was carried in 
a sieve (xooxiv@). This notion may have arisen from another 
ritual practice. It is noticeable that the sieves of the stone age _ 
seem to have been simply pierced jars. Sieve and pithos were one 
and the same. Carrying water in a sieve was an ancient test of © 
virginity. Pliny tells us that the test of the sieve was applied 
to the Vestal Tuccia. If the water-carrying of the Danaides | 
was conceived as a virginity test, the forty-nine sisters married — 
before the murder would fail at the test, and Hypermnestra alone » 
would carry the water in the leaky sieve : 











‘Splendide mendax et in omne virgo 
Nobilis aevum®.’ 


Finally, it will be remembered (p. 575) that the Orphics had | 
their Well of Memory, which was in effect a Well of Life. It would | 


* Eustath. ad Il. xx11. 141, p. 1293. 

2 For the vases known as Loutrophoroi see Milchhoeffer, 4. Mitt. v. 1880, p. 174), 
and P. Wolters, A. Mitt. xvz. 1891, p. 371, and ib. xvimt. 1893, p. 66. These vases, " 
were sometimes pierced at the bottom but it is not certain that the pierced yases — 
were placed only on the graves of the unmarried. 

3 Dr Frazer, ad P. x. 31. 9, collects a number of interesting modern parallels. 

Se Pilin Nate, SkVIee soe 

5 Hor. Od. 3. 11. 35. Apollodorus um. 1. 14 says of Hypermnestra airy 6 
Avykxéa dléswoe rapbévoy airny puddéavra. 


Pe = 


xT] The Danaides 623 


not escape a mystic who saw the figures of the water-carriers that 
these were drawing water for ever but in vain from the Well of 
Life. »So the scholiast’ to Aristides in quaint fashion interprets 
the myth: ‘the pierced pithos of the Danaides,’ he says, ‘signifies 
that the Danaides after the murder of their dearest can never 
obtain from another man the grace of the living water of 
marriage. The notion of a ‘Water of Life’ haunts him, but he 
knows the real gist of the symbolism, for he adds: they have 
‘become suspected on account of their pollution. Of the making 
of such mysticism there is clearly no end. 


The symbolism of marriage, of virginity tests, of living water 
might, doubtless did, gather about the figures of the Danaides, 
but the primary notion that fitted them to be mythical proto- 
types of the ‘Uninitiated’ was that they were polluted, uncleansed. 
They are Choephoroi, but in vain; the libations that they pour 
into the grave-pithoi of their husbands are a yapis dyapis, an 
attempted offscouring, aoa, but no real purification. Of 
such a vain Choephoria performed by Clytaemnestra Electra’ 
Says : 

‘It is not right or meet 
By law of gods or men that from a hateful wife 
Grave-dues and washings should be brought my father. 


Give them the winds, or in the deep dug earth 
Go hide them.’ 


The water-carriers in Hades have been discussed at some 
length*®, because they afford an instance typical of the methods 
of Orphic procedure. In discussing the mysteries it has been 
repeatedly seen that Orphism did not invent new rites, but 
mysticized and moralized old ones. In like fashion when 
Orphism developes eschatology, it takes for its material the 


1 Schol. ad Arist. Orat. 11. p. 229 rav dé Aavatdwy 6 Terpyuévos wiOos Td wrote 
Tavras peTa Tov dovov Tav Piltatwv Thy dvaiyovocay aitas ex Tis avdpelas kndeuovias 
Xapw map’ ddwv tvyxdvew, mace yevouevas iomTous dia Td Ayos. 

2 Soph. El. 433. 

3 It is scarcely necessary to say that in my interpretation of this myth I owe 
much to my predecessors, though my view is slightly different from any previously 
given. Controversy has raged as to whether the mythical Danaides gave rise to the 
‘Uninitiated’ or vice versé. This seems to me a fruitless question with no possible 
answer. Each form arose separately, and the point is their ultimate contaminatio. 
The literature of the controversy is given by Dr Frazer ad P. x. 31. 9. To his 
references may be added, Dammler, Delphika p. 22, and Mr A. B. Cook, J.H.S. 
xin. 1892, p. 97. 


624 Orphic Eschatology [CH. X 


mythology of the older stratum’, invents no new figures but 
gives to the old ones an intensified and moralized significance. 

The Orphic tablets showed us the heights to which Orphism 
could rise. If we are inclined to estimate over highly the 
general level of the Orphic faith, the Lower Italy vases may 
correct the error. They mirror Orphism as it seemed to the many. — 
In the matter of doctrine, instead of or at best in addition to 
purification, we have vindictive punishment; in the matter of 
theology, in place of what was practically monotheism on the 
tablets, the vases restore the old popular polytheism. 


It is natural to ask, Is this the end? Did Orphism create no 
new figure, make no new god in its own purified image? The 
answer to this question will be found in our concluding enquiry 
as to the nature of Orphic Cosmogony. 


1 T much regret that M. Salomon Reinach’s brilliant article on the criminals 
eternally condemned in Hades, ‘Sisyphe aux enfers et quelques autres damnés’ 
(Rev. Arch. 1903, p. 1), reached me too late for me to use the results of his — 
researches. } 


=e 


Cena @ se. te 


CHAPTER XII. 


ORPHIC COSMOGONY. 
“Qpaioc Kal “Epwc émitéAAeTal.. .” 


Ir, in attempting to understand Orphic Theogony, we turn to 
the collection of hymns known as ‘ Orphic,’ hymns dating for the 
most part about the 4th century A.D., we find ourselves at once 
in an atmosphere of mystical monotheism. We have addresses to 
the various Olympians, to Zeus and Apollo and Hera and Athene 
and the rest, but these are no longer the old, clear-cut, depart- 
mental deities, with attributes sharply distinguished and incom- 
municable; the outlines are all blurred; we feel that everyone is 
changing into everyone else. A few traditional epithets indeed 
remain; Poseidon is still ‘dark-haired, and ‘ Lord of Horses ’— 
he is a stubborn old god and hard to fuse; but, for the most part, 
sooner or later, all divinities greater or less, mingle in the mystery 
melting-pot, all become ‘multiform, ‘mighty,’ ‘all-nourishing, 
‘first-born,’ ‘saviours, ‘all-glorious, and the like. In a word the 
several gods by this time are all really one, and this one god 
is mystically conceived as a potency (daiuev) rather than a 
personal divinity (eds). 

The doctrine of the mutation of the gods, now into one shape, 
now into another, was, it would seem, part of the regular symbolic 
teaching of the mysteries. It is easy to see that such a doctrine 
would lend itself readily to the notion of their interchangeability. 
Proclus says?: ‘In all the rites of initiation and mysteries the gods 
exhibit their shapes as many, and they appear changing often 
from one form to another, and now they are made manifest in the 


1 Procl. Ennead. 1. 6.9 év admaci rats redeTais cal Tots uvornplois oi Geol roddas 
Mev éavt&v mporeivover mopdds, moda 6€ cxjmara é&addXatTovTes paivovrar Kal Tors 
Bev atimwrov aitav mpoBéBrynTat POs Tots dé els avOpwreoy wopdiv éeoxnuaTicpévor, 
Tore dé eis aNNotov TUrov mpoEAnAUO6s. 


H. : 40 


- 


626 ~  Orphic Cosmogony [CH | 


i) 























emission of formless light, now taking human shape, now again i 
other and different form.’ . 

By the date of the ‘Hymns’ monotheism was of course in some 
degree the common property of all educated minds, and cannot) 
therefore be claimed as distinctive of Orphism. Wholly Orphie, 
however, is the mystical joy with which the Hymns brim over; 
they are ‘full of repetitions and magniloquence, and make for 
emotion’. They are like learned, self-conscious, even pretentious 
echoes of the simple ecstasy of the tablets. 

It would therefore be idle to examine the Orphic Hym ; 
severally and in detail, in order to extract from them the Orphie 
characteristics of each particular god. Any one who reads them 
through will speedily be conscious that, save for the procemium, 
and an occasional stereotyped epithet, it would usually be im. 
possible to determine which hymn was addressed to what god, 
With whatever attempt at individualization they begin, the poet. 
is soon safe away into a mystical monotheism. A more profitable’ 
enquiry is, how far did primitive Orphism attempt monotheism, and 
of what nature was the one God whom the Orphic made in his own 
image? Here, fortunately, we are not left wholly without evidence, 


THE Worup-Eaa. 


In the Birds of Aristophanes?, the chorus tells of a time, 
when Earth and Air and Heaven as yet were not, only Chaos was, 
and Night and black Erebos: 


‘In the beginning of Things, black-winged Night 
Into the bosom of Erebos dark and deep 
Laid a wind-born egg, and, as the seasons rolled, 
Forth sprang Love, gleaming with wings of gold, 
Like to the whirlings of wind, Love the Delight— 
And Love with Chaos in Tartaros laid him to sleep ; 
And we, his children, nestled, fluttering there, 
Till he led us forth to the light of the upper air.’ 


This is pure Orphism. Homer knows of no world-egg*, 
no birth of Love. Homer is so dazzled by the splendour of his 


1 Mr Gilbert Murray, Greek Literature, p. 66. 2 Ar. Av. 692. 

8 The world-egg is of course an element common to many cosmogonies. It may 
very likely be one of the many elements primarily borrowed by Orphism from the 
Egyptians. The Egyptian demiurgus Chnoum gave birth to a cosmic egg, see 
Euseb. de praep. ev. 3.11. According to Diodorus (1. 27) Osiris says elui dé vlds” 
Kpévov mpecBiraros kal BXaords éx Kadod Te Kai evyevods wod, crépua ouvyyeves eyervT) ! 
Onv 7jvépas. Our concern here is merely with the particular form taken by the- 
doctrine in Orphism. 


xa] The World-Egg 627 





human heroes and their radiant reflections in Olympus that his 
eyes never look back to see from whence they sprang. He cares 
as little, it seems, for the Before as for the Hereafter. The two 
indeed seem strangely linked together. An eschatology and a 
| cosmogony are both pathetic attempts to answer the question 
Homer never cared to raise, Whence came Man and the Good and 
Evil of humanity ? 

We have of course a cosmogony in Hesiod, Hesiod who is a 
peasant and a rebel, a man bitter and weary with the hardness of 
life, compelled by rude circumstances to ask why things are 
so evil, and always ready, as in the myth of Pandora, to frame 
or borrow a crude superstitious hypothesis. How much Hesiod 
borrowed from Orphism is hard to say. He knows of Night and 
Chaos and the birth of Eros, but he does not know, or does not 
care to tell, of one characteristic Orphic element, the cosmic egg. 
| He only says!: 

‘First Chaos came to be and Gaia next 
Broad-bosomed, she that was the steadfast base 
Of all things—Ge, and murky Tartaros 
Deep in the hollow of wide earth. And next 
Eros, most beautiful of deathless gods, 


Looser of limbs, Tamer of heart and will 
To mortals and immortals.’ 


Hesiod is not wholly Orphic, he is concerned to hurry his Eros up 
into Olympus, one and most beautiful among many, but not for 
Hesiod the real source of life, the only God. 
_ By common traditional consent the cosmic egg was attributed 
to Orpheus. Whether the father was Tartaros or Erebos or 
Chronos is of small moment and varies from author to author. 
|The cardinal, essential doctrine is the world-egg from which 
sprang the first articulate god, source and creator of all, Eros. 
Damascius’, in his ‘Inquiry concerning first principles, attri- 
butes the egg to Orpheus. For Orpheus said: 


‘What time great Chronos fashioned in holy aether 
A silver-gleaming egg.’ 


It is fortunate that Damascius has preserved the actual line, 


l Hes. Theog. 116. 

2 Damasc. Quaest. de prim. princ. p. 147. The sources are fully given in Abel’s 
Orphica, p. 173. I am also indebted for references to Schdmann’s De Cupidine 
Cosmog., see Schomann, Opuscula, vol. 11. p. 60. 


40—2 
































628 Orphic Cosmogony ron 


though of course we cannot date it. Clement of Rome’ in his 
Homilies contrasts the cosmogonies of Hesiod and Orpheus, 
‘Orpheus likened Chaos to an egg, in which was then a blending 
of the primaeval elements; Hesiod assumes this chaos as a sub- 
stratum, the which Orpheus calls an egg, a birth emitted from 
formless matter, and the birth was on this wise...’ Plato, usually 
so Orphic, avoids in the 7imaeus all mention of the primaeval 
egg; his mind is preoccupied with triangles, but Proclus in his 
commentary? says ‘the “being” (7o dv) of Plato would be the 
same as the Orphic egg.’ 

The doctrine of the egg was not a mere dogmatic dead-letter. 
It was taught to the initiated as part of their mysteries, and this 
leads us to suspect that it had its rise in a primitive taboo on 
eggs. Plutarch*, in consequence of a dream, abstained for a long 
time from eggs. One night, he tells us, when he was dining out, 
some of the guests noticed this, and got it into their heads that 
he was ‘infected by Orphic and Pythagorean notions, and was- 
refusing eggs just as certain people refuse to eat the heart and_ 
brains, because he held an egg to be taboo (agocvodc Oar) as being 
the principle of life.’ Alexander the Epicurean, by way of chaff, 
quoted, 


‘To feed on beans is eating parents’ heads.’ 


‘As if,’ Plutarch says, ‘the Pythagoreans meant eggs by beans: 
because of being (@s 6) kudpous Ta wa S1a THY KUNOLY aivLTTOMEVOD: 
Tov avdpev), and thought it just as bad to eat eggs as to eat th 
animals that laid them.’ It was no use, he goes on, in talking; 
to an Epicurean, to plead a dream as an excuse for abstinence, fo 
to him the explanation would seem more foolish than the fact; 
so, as Alexander was quite pleasant about it and a cultivated ma 
Plutarch let him go on to propound the interesting question, 
which came first, the bird or the egg? Alexander in the course. 
of the argument came back to Orpheus and, after quoting Plato 
about matter being the mother and nurse, said with a smile, 


‘T sing to those who know 


1 Clem. Rom. Homil. vi. 4. 671 Kal ’Oppeds 5é 7d Xdos Ww maperxafel, € OT 
arpwrwv ororxelwy Av n aiyxvots, ToVTO ‘Halodos Xdos brorlberat, Srep ‘Oppeds wor r 
yevvntov é& dmelpov THs UAns mpoBeBnuevor, yeyovds dé otrw, K.T.r. 

~ Proc. in Plat. Tim. 2, p. 307 elm dv ravrov 76 Te ILNdTwvos ov Kal 7d Oppuxoy wi 

3 Plut. Quaest. Symp. u. 3. 1. 4 


xn] . The Egg in Orphic Ritual 629 


the Orphic and sacred dogma (Aoyos) which not only affirms 
that the egg is older than the bird, but gives it priority of being 
over all things.’ Finally, the speaker adds to his theorizing an 
instructive ritual fact: ‘and therefore it is not inappropriate that 
in the orgiastic ceremonies in honour of Dionysos an egg is among 
the sacred offerings, as being the symbol of what gives birth to all 
things, and in itself contains all things.’ 

Macrobius' in the Saturnalia states the same fact, and gives 
a similar reason. ‘Ask those who have been initiated,’ he says, 
‘in the rites of Father Liber, in which an egg is the object of 
reverence, on the supposition that it is in its spherical form the 
image of the universe’; and Achilles Tatius* says, ‘some assert 
that the universe is cone-shaped, others egg-shaped, and this 
opinion is held by those who perform the mysteries of Orpheus.’ 

But for the bird-cosmogony of Aristophanes we might have 
inclined to think that the egg was a late importation into Orphic 
mysteries, but, the more closely Orphic doctrines are examined, 
the more clearly is it seen that they are for the most part based 
on very primitive ritual. A ritual egg was good material; those 
who mysticized the kid and the milk would not be likely to leave 
an egg without esoteric significance. 

How, precisely, the egg was used in Orphic ritual we do not 
know. In ordinary ceremonial it served two purposes: it was 
used for purification, it was an offering to the dead. It has been 
previously shown in detail (p. 53) that in primitive rites pur- 
gation often is propitiation of ghosts and sprites, and the two 
functions, propitiation and purgation, are summed up in the 
common term devotions (évayicpata). Lucian® in two passages 
mentions eggs, together with Hecate’s suppers, as the refuse of 
‘purification.’ Pollux is bidden by Diogenes to tell the Cynic 
Menippus, when he comes down to Hades, to ‘ fill his wallet with 
beans, and if he can he is to pick up also a Hecate’s supper or an 
egg from a purification or something of the sort’; and in another 
dialogue, the ‘Landing, Clotho, who is waiting for her victims, 
jasks ‘ Where is Kyniskos the philosopher who ought to be dead from 
ing Hecate’s suppers and eggs from purification and raw cuttle 












1 Macrob. Sat. vu. 16, 691. 
2 Achill. Tat. Isag. ad Arati Phenom., p. 77. 
° Luc. Dial. Mort. 1. 1 and Catapl. 7. 















630 Orphie Cosmogony oe 
: 
fish too?’ Again in Ovid’s Art of Love! the old hag who makes. 


purifications for the sick woman is to bring sulphur and eggs: 
‘Then too the aged hag must come, 
And purify both bed and home, 
And bid her, for lustration, proffer 
With palsied hands both eggs and sulphur.’ 

That eggs were offered not only for a purification of the living, 
but as the due of the dead, is certain from the fact that they 
appear on Athenian white lekythoi among the objects brought in 
baskets to the tomb?. 

We think of eggs rather as for nourishment than as for puri- 
fication, though the yolk of an egg is still used for the washing of 
hair. Doubtless, in ancient days, the cleansing action of eggs was. 
more magical than actual. As propitiatory offerings to the dead 
(€vayicpara) they became ‘purifications’ in general; then con- 
nection with the dead explains of course the taboo on them as food, 

Still, primitive man though pious is also thrifty. A Cynic may 
show his atheism, and also eke out a scanty subsistence by eating 
‘eggs from purification’; and even the most superstitious m 
may have hoped that, if he did not break the egg, he ith 
cleanse himself and yet secure a chicken. Clement* says, ‘ you! 
may see the eggs that have been used for purifications hatched, if 
they are subjected to warmth’: he adds instructively, ‘this could” 

not have taken place if the eggs had taken into themselves the; 
sins of the man who had been purified.” Clement’s own sta i 
of mind is at least as primitive as that of the ‘heathen’ against’ 
whom he protests. The Orphics themselves, it is clear, eae 
mysticized an ancient ritual. Orphism is here as elsewhere onl a 
the pouring of new wine into very old bottles. 


We may say then with certainty that the cosmic egg was 
Orphic, and was probably‘ a dogma based on a primitive rite, 
The origin of the winged Eros who sprang from it is more complex, 
Elements many and diverse seem to have gone to his making. 


1 Ov. Ars Am. 11. 330. Cf. Juvenal vi. 518. 

2 This fact, that eggs were offered to the dead, has been clearly established by 
Dr Martin Nilsson in his tract Das Ei im Totenkultus der Griechen. The ‘Sonder= 
abdruck’ he has kindly sent me appeared in the Fran Filologiska Foreningen i Lum 
Sprakliga uppsatser 11. (Lund, 1902). 

3 Clem. Al. Str, vit. 4, p. 713 opav yody ort Ta Ga awd Twy TepikabapHevTur, el 6 
Pbein, Fworyovotpmeva, ovK dy 5é TovTO éyévero el dvehauBavey Ta TOU TEpiKabapHErTOS Ke 

4 It is possible that the cosmic egg may have been imported from Egypt 
contaminated later with the egg of purification. 


am 





| xa | Eros as Herm 631 


Eros AS HER. 


Homer knows nothing of Eros as a person; with him love is 
of Aphrodite. From actual local cultus Eros is strangely and 
significantly absent. Two instances only are recorded. Pausanias* 
says, ‘The Thespians honoured Eros most of all the gods from 
the beginning, and they have a very ancient image of him, 
an unwrought stone. ‘Every four years, Plutarch’ says, ‘the 
Thespians celebrated a splendid festival to Eros conjointly with 
the Muses.’ Plutarch went to this festival very soon after he was 
married, before his sons were born. He seems to have gone 
because of a difference that had arisen between his own and his 
wife’s people, and we are expressly told by his sons that he took 
his newly-married wife with him ‘for both the prayer and the 
sacrifice were her affair.’ Probably they went to pray for children. 
Plutarch, if we may trust his own letter to his wife, was a kind 
husband, but the intent of the conjoint journey was strictly 
practical, and points to the main function of the Thespian Eros. 
The ‘unwrought stone’ is very remote from the winged Eros, 
very near akin to the rude Pelasgian Hermes himself, own brother 
to the Priapos* of the Hellespont and Asia Minor. There seems 
then to have gone to the making of Eros some old wide-spread 
‘divinity of generation. 

Pausanias did not know who instituted the worship of Eros 
among the Thespians, but he remarks that the people of Parium 
on the Hellespont, who were colonists from Erythrae in Ionia, 
worshipped him equally. He knew also of an older and a younger 
Eros. ‘Most people,’ he says, ‘hold that he is the youngest of the 
gods and the son of Aphrodite; but Olen the Lycian (again Asia 
Minor), maker of the most ancient hymns among the Greeks, says 
in a hymn to Hileithyia that she is the mother of Eros.’ ‘ After 
Olen,’ he goes on, ‘Pamphos and Orpheus composed epic verses, 
and they both made hymns to Eros to be sung by the Lycomids at 
their rites.’ 


ee Tx. 217.1. 2 Amatsd. 
® Diod. tv. 6 pudoroyobcw ofv of madacol Tov Iplarov vidy elvac Tod Acovicov Kal 


’Adpodirns. 


632 Orphic Cosmogony sie 


Eros AS Ker OF LIFE. 


The Orphic theologist found then to his hand in local cultus an 
ancient god of life and generation, and in antique ritual another 
element quite unconnected, the egg of purification. Given an egg 
as the beginning of a cosmogony, and it was almost inevitable that 
there should emerge from the egg a bird-god, a winged thing, 
a source of life, more articulate than the egg yet near akin to 
it in potency. The art-form for this winged thing was also ready 
to hand. Eros is but a specialized form of the Ker; the Erotes are 
Keres of life, and like the Keres take the form of winged 
Eidola. In essence as in art-form, Keres and Erotes are near 
akin. The Keres, it has already been seen, are little winged 
bacilli, fructifying or death-brmging ; but the Keres developed 
mainly on the dark side; they went downwards, deathwards; the 
Erotes, instinct with a new spirit, went upwards, lifewards. 

The close analogy, nay, the identity of the art-form of Keres. 
and Erotes is well seen in the 
two vase-paintings in figs. 168 
and 169. The design in fig. 168 
is from a vase-fragment in the 
Museum at Palermo’. A warrior 
lies fallen in death. From his 
open mouth the breath of life 
escapes. Over him hovers a 
winged Ker, and with his right 
hand seems as though he would 
tenderly collect the parting soul. 
A ghost has come to fetch a 
ghost. Among the Romans 
this gentle office of collecting 
the parting breath was done 
with the lips, by the nearest 
of kin. So Anna? for Dido: 


‘Give water, I will bathe her wounds, and catch 
Upon my lips her last stray breath.’ 





Fie. 168. 


7 


1 Inv. 2351. P. Hartwig, J.H.S. x11. 1891, p. 340. 
is Verg. Aen. tv. 684. If we may trust Servius (ad loc.), with strictly practical 
intent, ‘Muliebriter tanquam possit animam sororis excipere et in se transferre. 


g 


, 


XII | Eros as Ker of Life 633 


‘The design in fig. 169 is from a red-figured cylix’ in the 
Municipal Museum at Corneto. Theseus, summoned by Hermes, 





Fie. 169. 


is in the act of deserting Ariadne; he picks up his sandal from 
the ground and in a moment he will be gone. Ariadne is sunk in 
sleep beneath the great vine of Dionysos. Over her hovers a winged 
genius to comfort and to crown her. He is own brother to the 
delicate Ker in fig. 168. Archaeologists wrangle over his name. 
Is he Life or Love or Sleep or Death? Who knows? It is this 
shifting uncertainty we must seize and hold; no doubt could 
be more beautiful and instructive. All that we can certainly 
say is that the vase-painter gave to the ministrant the form 
of a winged Ker, and that such was the form taken by Eros, as 
also by Death and by Sleep. 


If we would understand at all the spirit in which the Orphic. 
Eros is conceived we must cleanse our minds of many current 
conceptions, and in effecting this riddance vase-paintings are of 
no small service. To black-figured vase-paintings Eros is unknown. 
Keres of course appear, but Eros has not yet developed personality 
in popular art. As soon as Eros takes mythological shape in art, 
he leaves the Herm-form under which he was worshipped at 
Thespiae, leaves it to Hermes himself and to Dionysos and Priapos, 


Sic Cicero in Verrinis ‘“‘ut extremum filiorum spiritum ore excipere liceret.””’ So 
according to the thinking of many primitive people are new souls born of old souls, 
see Tylor, Primitive Culture, 11. p. 4. 

1 Wiener Vorlegeblitter, Serie p, Taf. vu. 


634 Orphic Cosmogony [CH. 


and, because he is the egg-born cosmic god, takes shape as the 
winged Ker. Early red-figured vase-paintings are innocent alike 
of the fat boy of the Romans and the idle impish urchin of 
Hellenism. Nor do they know anything of the Eros of modern 
romantic passion between man and woman. If we would follow 
. the safe guiding of early art, we must be content to think of Eros 
as a Ker, a life-impulse, a thing fateful to all that lives, a man be- 
cause of his moralized complexity, terrible and sometimes intoler- 
able, but to plants and flowers and young live things in spring 
infinitely glad and kind. Such is the Eros of Theognis’ : 


‘Love comes at his hour, comes with the flowers in spring, 
Leaving the land of his birth, 

Kypros, beautiful isle. Love comes, scattering 
Seed for man upon earth.’ 





Such little spirits of life the vase-painter Hieron makes to 
cluster round their mother and mistress, Aphrodite. The design) 





Fia. 170. : 
in fig. 170 is from a cylix in the Berlin Museum® and is wall 
, 


1 Theog. 1275. 2 Cat. 2291. Wiener Vorlegedblitter, Serie a, Taf. v. 


xo] Eros as Ker of Life 635 


of a scene representing the Judgment of Paris. Aphrodite, she 
the victorious Gift-Giver, greatest of the Charites, stands holding 
her dove. About her cluster the little solemn worshipping 
Erotes, like the winged Keres that minister to Kyrene (fig. 23): 
they carry wreaths and flower-sprays in their hands, not only 
as gifts to the Gift-Giver, but because they too are spirits of Life 
and Grace. 

Just such another Eros is seen in fig. 171, from the centre of 





lives Uae 


a beautiful archaic red-figured cylix! in the Museo Civico at 
Florence. The cylix is signed by the master Chachrylion : he 
signs it twice over, proudly, as*well he may, ‘Chachrylion made 
it, made it, Chachrylion made it. His Eros too carries a great 
branching flower-spray, and as the spirit of God moves upon the 


face of the waters. So Sophocles’: 


® O Thou of War unconquered, thou, Erés, 


Spoiler of garnered gold, who liest hid 
In a girl’s cheek, under the dreaming lid, 
While the long night time flows : 


Museo Ital. di Antichita, vol. 111. 1, pl. 2. 
Soph. Ant. 781, trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray. 


1 
2 


636 Orphic Cosmogony [ CH. 


O rover of the seas, O terrible one 
In wastes and wildwood caves, 
None may escape thee, none: 
Not of the heavenly Gods who live alway, 
Not of low men, who vanish ere the day ; 
And he who finds thee, raves. 

The Erotes retain always the multiplicity of the Keres, but as 
Eros developes complete personality he becomes one person, 
and he changes from a delicate sprite to a beautiful youth, 
But down to late days there linger about him traces of the Life- 
Spirit, the Grace-Giver. The design in fig. 172 is from a late red- 
figured vase in the Museum at Athens'. Here we find Eros 





employed watering tall slender flowers in a garden. Of course by 
this time the Love-God is put to do anything and everything: 
degraded to a god of all work, he has to swing a maiden, to 
trundle a hoop, to attend a lady’s toilet; but here in the flower- 
watering there seems a haunting of the old spirit. We are 
reminded of Plato” in the Symposium where he says ‘'The bloom 
of his body is shown by his dwelling among flowers, for Eros has 
his abiding, not in the body or soul that is flowerless and fades, but 
in the place of fair flowers and fair scents, there sits he and abides.’ 

1 Cat, 1852. Fig. 172 is reproduced from a hasty sketch kindly made for me by 
Mrs Hugh Stewart; it is only intended as a note of subject and not as a substitute 


for complete publication, 
2 Plat. Symp. 196 a. 


xm] Eros as Ephebos 637 


Eros AS EPHEBOS. 


Vase-paintings with representations of Eros come to us for the 
most part from Athens, and it was at Athens that the art-type of 
Eros as the slender ephebos was perfected. This type appears 
with marked frequency on the vases of early red-figured technique 
which bear the inscription xaos ‘ beautiful, vases probably made 
to sell as love-gifts. Eros is represented bearing a torch, a lyre, 
a hare, sometimes still a flower. Perhaps the finest of these 
representations left us is the Eros in fig. 173. The design is from 





Eire. 173. 


an amphora’ which bears the inscription ‘Charmides is beautiful.’ 
Eros is armed, he carries shield and spear, he flies straight 
downward, the slender naked body making a clean lovely line. 
A poet thinks as he will, but these Love-gods of the vase-painter, 
these Keres of Life and Death, and most of all this Eros, armed, 


1 Now in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, De Ridder, Cat. 366; see Lenormant 
et de Witte, Elite des Monuments Céramographiques tv., Pl. 11. 


638 Orphic Cosmogony [e | 


inevitable, recall the prayer of the chorus in the Hippolytus of 
Euripides’ : 


‘Erés, Erds, who blindest, tear by tear, 
Men’s eyes with hunger, thou swift Foe that pliest 
Deep in our hearts joy like an edged spear ; 
Come not to me with Evil haunting near, 
Wrath on the wind, nor jarring of the clear 
Wing’s music as thou fliest. 
There is no shaft that burneth, not in fire, 
Not in wild stars, far off and flinging fear 
As in thine hands the shaft of All Desire, 
Erés, Child of the Highest.’ 


Most often the presentments of painting hinder rather than 
help the imagery of poetry, but here both arts are haunted by 
the same august tradition of Life and Death. 

The Eros of the vase-painter is the love not untouched by 
passion of man for man, and these sedate and even austere Erotes- 
help us to understand that to the Greek mind such loves were 
serious and beautiful, of the soul, as Plato says, rather than of 





Fie. 174, 


the body, aloof from common things and from the emotion 
squalour of mere domestic felicity. They seem to embody tha 
white beat of the spirit before which and by which the fles 
shrivels into silence, 

1 Kur. Hipp. 525. 


XII | Eros and the Mother 639 


It is curious to note that, as the two women Charites, Mother 
and Daughter, became three, so there is a distinct effort to form 
a trinity of Erotes. On the vase-painting in fig. 174 from a red- 
figured stamnos in the British Museum’ we have three beautiful 
Erotes flying over the sea. The foremost is inscribed Himeros ; 
he carries a long taenia, and he looks back at the others; one of 
these carries a tendril, the other a hare. Near each of them 
is written «xados. But the triple forms, Eros, Himeros and 
Pothos, never really obtain. The origin of the countless women 
trinities has been already examined. Male gods lack the natural 
tie that bound the women types together; the male trinity is in 
Greek religion felt to be artificial and lapses. 


EROS AND THE MOTHER. 


The mention of these women trinities brings us back to the 
greatest of the three Grace-Givers, Aphrodite. At the close of 
the chapter on The Making of a Goddess her figure reigned 
supreme, but for a time at Athens she suffered celipke ; we might 
almost say with Alceman?: 

‘There is no Aphrodite. Hungry Love 
Plays boy-like with light feet upon the flowers.’ 

We cannot fairly charge the eclipse of Aphrodite wholly to the 
count of Orphism. Legend made Orpheus a woman-hater and 
credited him with Hesiodic tags about her ‘ dog-like’ nature; but 
such tradition is manifestly coloured and distorted by two in- 
fluences, by the orthodox Hesiodic patriarchalism, and by the 
peculiar social conditions of Athens and other Greek states. Both 
these causes, by degrading women, compelled the impersonation of 
love to take form as a youth. 

To these we must add the fact that as Orphism was based on 
the religion of Dionysos, and as that religion had for its god 
Dionysos, son of Semele, so Orphism tended naturally to the 
formulation of a divinity who was the Son of his Mother. By 
the time the religion of Dionysos reached Athens the Son had 


1 Cat. © 440. Mon. d. Inst. 1. Pl. vit, The design in fig. 38, Odysseus 
passing the Sirens, is from the obverse of this vase. The three Sirens probably 
suggested the triple Erotes. 

* Alcman frg. 38 (34). 


640 Orphic Cosmogony rou 






well nigh effaced the Mother, and in like fashion Eros was supreme 
over Aphrodite; and significantly enough the woman-goddess, 
in so far as she was worshipped by the Orphics, was rather the 
old figure of Ge, the Earth-goddess, than the more specialized” 
departmental Love-goddess Aphrodite. 


This blend of the old Earth-goddess and the new Love-god 
is shown in very instructive fashion by representations on late 
red-figured vases. The design in fig. 175 is from a late red- 





Bie. 175. 


figured hydria’. It will at once be seen that we have the repre=_ 
sentation of a scene exactly similar to that in figs. 68 and 70, the” 
Anodos of an Earth-goddess. The great head rises from the 
ground, the Satyr worshippers of the Earth-goddess are there 
with their picks. But a new element is introduced. Two Erotes: 
hover over the goddess to greet her coming. In like fashion 
in fig. 72 Eros receives Pandora, and in fig. 88 receives Aphro- 
dite at her Birth or Bath. It is usual to name the goddess in 
fig. 175 Aphrodite. This is, I think, to miss the point. She is: 
an Earth Kore like Persephone herself. She is the new life rising” 
from the ground, and she is welcomed by the spirits of life, the’ 
Keres-Erotes. Beyond that we cannot go. Nothing could better 
embody the shift from old to new, and the blend of both, than 
the presence together of the Satyrs, the primitive Ge-worshippers, 
and the Erotes, the new spirits of love and life. 


1 Froéhner, Choix de vases grecs, Pl. vi. p. 24. 


x1] Aphrodite of the Mysteries 641 


If we bear in mind the simple fact that Aphrodite and Perse- 
phone are each equally and alike Kore, the Maiden form of the 
Earth-goddess, it is not hard to realise how easily the one figure 
passes into the other. The Orphic, we have seen (p. 594), put his 
faith in the Kore who is Persephone; to her he prays: 

‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below’; 
his confession is 
‘IT have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld,’ 
and again 


‘But now I come a suppliant to holy Phersephoneia 
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed’; 


but from the fragment of an epic poet preserved for us by the 
anonymous author of the Philosophoumena’, we learn that, accord- 
ing to some, in the underworld grove another Kore, or rather Kore 
by another name, was believed to rule. ‘The Lesser Mysteries,’ 
he says, ‘are of Persephone below, in regard to which Mysteries 
and the path that leads there, which is wide and large and leads 
the dying to Persephone, the poet also says : 


“And yet ’neath it there is a rugged track, 
Hollow, bemired; yet best whereby to reach — 
All-hallowed Aphrodite’s lovely grove.”’ 


The figures of the two Maidens, Persephone and Aphrodite, 
acted and reacted on each other; Persephone takes on more of 
Love, Aphrodite more of Death ; as Eros the Son waxes, Aphrodite 
the Mother wanes into Persephone the underworld Maid. 

The blend of the two notions, the primitive Earth-goddess 
and the Orphic Eros, is for art very clearly seen on the vase in 
fig. 175. Happily we have definite evidence that in local cultus 
there was the like fusion, and that at a place of associations 
specially sacred, the deme of Phlya in Attica, the birthplace of 

uripides’. 


THE MYSTERIES OF EROS AND THE MOTHER AT PHLYA. 


Phlya, as the birthplace of Euripides, has special claims on 
ur attention. Here, it will be shown, were mysteries reputed to 
e more ancient than those of Eleusis, mysteries not only of the 

other and the Maid but of Eros the cosmic spirit of the Orphics. 


1 Philosoph. v. 8, ed. Cruice, 2 Harpocrat. s.v. Pdveis. 


H. 4] 













642 Orphic Cosmogony [© 


Euripides, obviously hostile as he is to orthodox Olympian theology, 
handles always with reverence the two gods or spirits of Orphism, 
Dionysos and Eros; it seems not improbable that, perhaps uncon- 
sciously, the mysteries of his early home may have influenced his 
religious attitude. 

From Pausanias‘ we learn that Phlya had a cult of the Earth- 
goddess. She was worshipped together with a number of other 
kindred divinities. ‘Among the inhabitants of Phlya there are 
altars of Artemis the Light-Bearer, and of Dionysos Anthios, and 
of the Ismenian Nymphs, and of Ge, whom they call the Great 
Goddess. And another temple has altars of Demeter Anesidora, 
and of Zeus Ktesios, and of Athene Tithrone, and of Kore Proto- 
gene, and of the goddesses called Venerable.’ 

The district of Phlya? is still well watered and fertile, still 
a fitting home for Dionysos ‘of the Flowers, and for Demeter 
‘Sender up of Gifts’; probably it took its name from this char- 
acteristic fertility®. Plutarch‘ discussed with some grammarians at 
dessert the reason why apples were called by Empedocles iwépddoa, 
“very fruitful.’ Plutarch made a bad and unmetrical guess; he 
thought the word was connected with ¢dovos, husk or rind, ani 
that the apple was called b7répdXovor ‘ because all that was eatable 
in it lay outside the inner rind-like core. The grammarians 
_knew better; they pointed out that Aratus® used the word dcop 
to mean verdure and blossoming, the ‘greenness and bloom 
of fruits, and they added the instructive statement that ‘certain 
of the Greeks sacrificed to Dionysos Phloios, ‘ He of blossom ané 
growth.’ Dionysos Phloios and Dionysos Anthios are one and the 
Same potency. 

















1 p.1. 31.4. Attention was first drawn to this passage in connection with a 
*Anodos’ vase-paintings by Prof. Furtwangler, Jahrbuch d. Inst. 1891, pp. 117— 
124, but with his interpretation of the vases T find myself unable to agree (see p. 282, 
n 2) and the evidence from the Philosophoumena seems to be unknown to him. 

2 See Dr Frazer, Pausanias, vol. 1m. p. 412. 

3 The roots ode, PAL, PAv and the guttural form xz (ef. xAcd}) all express the 
same notion of bursting, bubbling, germinating, see Vanicek ad voc, and ef. Hesych. 
pret? yéuet, evkaprrel, woAvKaprre?, and the words gdvcrawa, Prvifec. 

4 Plut. Symp. v. 8. 2 and 3 roi d€ ’Eumedoxdéous elpnxdros* 

otvexev dlyovol re cidat kai UrépdAora m7pra. 
The text has iaéppdo1a: the superfluous « may have crept in owing to Plutarch 
uess. : 

5 Plut. loc. cit. duolws rov "Aparov éml tov Decplov Néyorra* 

Kal Ta pev Eppwoev tov dé PAdov Weve TavTa, 
Tiv XAwpornta Kal 7d dvOos TwY Kapr&v Pbov mpocayopevew...eivar dé Kal Tar ‘ENAjra@ 
Tivas ot PAolw Avovricw Ovovew. 


XI | Mysteries at Phlya 643 


Among this family group of ancient earth divinities Artemis 
und Zeus read like the names of late Olympian intruders. 
Artemis as Light-Bearer may have taken over an ancient mystery 
sult of Hecate, who also bore the title of Phosphoros; Zeus 
Ktesios, we are certain, is not the Olympian. Like Zeus Meilichios 
he has taken over the cult of an old divinity of ‘acquisition ’ and 
fertility. ‘Zeus’ Ktesios was the god of the storeroom. Harpo- 
eration’ says, ‘they set up Zeus Ktesios in storerooms. The 
yod himself lived in a jar. In discussing the various shapes of 
vessels Athenaeus’ says of the kadiskos, ‘it is the vessel in which 
they consecrate the Ktesian Zeuses, as Antikleides says in his 
‘Interpretations,’ as follows—the symbols of Zeus Ktesios are con- 
secrated as follows: “the lid must be put on a new kadiskos with 
bwo handles, and the handles crowned with white wool...... 
and you must put into it whatever you chance to find and 
pour in ambrosia. Ambrosia is pure water, olive oil and all 
fruits (7rayxdap7ea). Pour in these.”’ Whatever are the obscurities 
of the account of Antikleides, thus much is clear—Zeus Ktesios is 
not the Olympian of the thunderbolt, he is Zeus in nothing but 
his name*®. tesios is clearly an old divinity of fertility, of the 
same order as Meilichios; his onueta are symbols not statues, 
symbols probably like the sacra carried in chests at the Arrephoria ; 
shey are Gecpot, magical spells kept in a jar for the safe guarding 
of the storeroom. Zeus Ktesios is well in place at Phlya. The 
great pithoi that in Homer stand on the threshold of Olympian 
= (p. 47) may be the last reminiscence of this earlier Dian 
aemon who had his habitation, genius-like, in a jar. 

But this old daemon of fertility who took on the name of Zeus 
nly concerns us incidentally. In the complex of gods enumerated 
y Pausanias as worshipped at Phlya, the Great Goddess is mani- 
estly chief. The name given to Kore, Protogene, suggests 

rphism, but we are not told that it was a mystery cult, and of 
ros there is no notice. Happily from other sources we know 


9 


? Harp. s.v. Kragiou Avés*...Krjcvov Ala év rots rapelors iSpuvTo. 

2 Athen. x1, 46 § 473: the portions omitted kal éx Tod auov Tod deEtod Kal Ex Tov 
erwmou Tod Kpoxiov are unintelligible as they stand, but their meaning does not 
ffect the present argument, 

3 Probably not even in name; if my conjecture be correct the Alas set up are of 

€ same nature as the dirae and the diov kwédiov, see p. 23, note 2. 


41—2 


y és 


644 Orphic Cosmogony [cH 


further particulars. In discussing the parentage of Themistocles 
Plutarch’ asserts that Themistocles was related to the family of 
the Lycomids. ‘This is clear,’ he says, ‘ for Simonides states that, 
when the Telesterion at Phlya, which was the common property, 
of the gens of the Lycomids, was burnt down by the barbarians, 


Themistocles himself restored it and decorated it with paintings! 


In this Telesterion, this ‘ Place of Initiation,’ the cult of Eros was 


practised. The evidence is slight but sufficient. In discussing 
the worship of Eros at Thespiae Pausanias states incidentally, we: 
already noted (p. 471), that the poets Pamphos and Orpheus both 
composed ‘poems about Eros to be chanted by the Lycomids over 
their rites.’ 
This mystery cult, we further know, was also addressed to 
a form of the Earth goddess. When actually at Phlya, Pausanias, 
as already noted, curiously enough says nothing of mysteries: he 
simply notes that the Great Goddess and other divinities were 
worshipped there. Probably by his time the mystery cult of 
Phlya was completely overshadowed and obscured by the domi- 
nant, orthodox rites at Eleusis. But, apropos of the mysteries at 
Andania in Messene’, he gives significant details about Phlya. 
He tells us three facts which all go to show that the cult at Phlya 
was a mystery-cult. First, the mysteries of Andania were, he 
says, brought there by a grandson of Phlyos; and this Phlyos, we 
may conclude, was the eponymous hero of Phlya. Second, for the 
Lycomids, who, we have seen, had a ‘ Place of Initiation’ at Phlya 
and hymns to Eros, Musaeus wrote a hymn to Demeter, and in 
this hymn it was stated that Phlyos was a son of Ge. Third) 
Methapos, the great ‘deviser of rites of initiation, had a statue 1D 
the sanctuary of the Lycomids, the metrical inscription on which 
Pausanias quotes. In view of this evidence it cannot be doubted 
that the cult of Phlya was a mystery-cult, and the divinities wor 
shipped among others were the Mother and the Maid and Eros. 
At Phlya then, it is clear, we have just that blend of divinities 
that appears on the vase-painting in fig. 175. We have the 
* 























¢ 

1 Plut. Them. 1. Pausanias (1v. 1. 7) in speaking of this same telesterion, whie 

was the sanctuary of the Lycomids, calls it by the very peculiar name «Xow 

Dr Frazer translates «Moov ‘chapel.’ The word may mean a ‘lean to,’ a ro 

annexe, but I would conjecture that here it means the same as zagords, i.e. ‘ brid 

chamber,’ the place of the iepds yduos, see p. 536. 
He) Sa Gel Pe haf 0 le 


x0] Mysteries at Phlya 645 


worship of the great Earth-goddess who was Mother and Maid in 
one, and, conjointly, we have the worship of the Orphic spirit 
of love and life, Eros. It is probable that the worship of the 
Earth-goddess was primaeval, and that Eros was added through 
Orphic influence. 


The Eros of the Athenian vase-painting is the beautiful 
Attic boy, but there is evidence to show that the Eros of Phlya 
was conceived of as near akin in form to a Herm. In discussing 
the Orphic mysteries (p. 536), we found that at Phlya according 
to the anonymous author of the Philosophowmena there was a 
maotas or bridal-chamber decorated with paintings. This bridal 
chamber was probably the whole or a part of that Telesterion 
which was restored and decorated by Themistocles. The subjects 
of these paintings Plutarch had fully discussed in a treatise now 
unhappily lost. The loss is to be the more deeply regretted because 
the account by Plutarch of pictures manifestly Orphic would have 
been sympathetic and would greatly have helped our under- 
standing of Orphism. The author of the Philosophowmena’ de- 
scribes briefly one picture and one picture only, as follows: ‘ There 
is in the gateway the picture of an old man, white-haired, 
winged; he is pursuing a blue-coloured woman who escapes. Above 
the man is written daos pvévTns, above the woman srependixona. 
Accérding to the doctrine of the Sethians, it seems that aos 
pvévtns is light and that q¢cxoda is dark water. The exact 
meaning of these mysterious paintings is probably lost for ever ; 
but it is scarcely rash to conjecture that the male figure is Eros. 
He pursues a woman; he is winged; that is like the ordinary 
Eros of common mythology. But this is the Eros of the mysteries ; 
not young, but very ancient, and white-haired, the apyatos épws* 
of Orphic tradition, eldest of all the Gods. And the name written 
above him as he pursues his bride inscribed ‘Darkness’ or 
‘Dark Water’ is ‘Phaos Ruentes, ‘The rushing or streaming 
Light. We are reminded of the time when ‘the Spirit of God 

1 Philosophowm. v. 3 ed. Cruice, éors 6° év rots mudewor Kai mpecBirns Tis 
lb eyyeypammévos, moNds, TTEpwTos, yuvalka amopevyoutay diwkwy Kvavoe.d7 (kuvoerdA the 
Ms.: but Schneidewin’s correction is generally admitted). émiyéypamrar 6é émi rod 
mpecBiTou' dos puévrTns, érl b€ THS yuvaikds’ mepengixdva. oixe SE eivar Kara 
Tov Unbiavav Abyov 6 Hdos puévrns TO pws, TO 5é ckorevdyv Uiwp 7 gpixdda, TO GE év 


Méow ToUTwY SidoTyUa apmovia mvevuaros weTakd TeTaymEvou. 


* Lue. de Salt. 7, and Xen. Symp. viu. 1. 


646 Orphic Cosmogony fox 


moved upon the face of the waters. The ancient Eros of 
Thespiae, who was in intent a Herm, has become the principle not 
only of Life but of Light—Light pursuing and penetrating Dark- 
ness, Exactly such a being, such a strange blend of animal and 
spiritual, is the egg-born Protogonos of the Orphic hymn’: 


‘Thou tempest spirit in all the ordered world 
On wild wings flashing; bearer of bright light 
And holy ; therefore Phanes named, and Lord 
Priapos, and the Dawn that answereth Dawn.’ 


So chants the mystic, seeking to utter the unutterable, and 
the poet?, born in the home of mysticism, sings to Mother and 


Son: 


‘Thou comest to bend the pride 
Of the hearts of God and man, 
Cypris; and by thy side ; 
In earth’s encircling span 
He of the changing plumes, 
The Wing that the world illumes, 
As over the leagues of land flies he, 
Over the salt and sounding sea. 


For mad is the heart of Love, 
And gold the gleam of his wing ; 
And all to the spell thereof 
Bend, when he makes his spring ; 
All life that is wild and young, 
In mountain and wave and stream, 
All that of earth is sprung 
Or breathes in the red sunbeam. 
Yea and Mankind. O’er all a royal throne, . 
Cyprian, Cyprian, is thine alone.’ 


PYTHAGOREAN REVIVAL OF THE MOTHER. 


The development of the male Eros, the beautiful youth, was due, 
we may be sure, to influences rather Athenian than Orphic. In 
this connection it is important to note that the Orphic Pytha- 
goreans tended to revive religious conceptions that were matri- 
archal rather than patriarchal. The religion of Dionysos, based 
on the worship of Mother and Son, gave to women a freedom and 
a consequence possible only perhaps among the more spiritual 
peoples of the North. Under Pythagoras we have clear indications 


: 
| 
| 
| 
| 
i 







1 Orph. Hymn. vi. 7 (trans. by Mr Gilbert Murray): 
mavrn Swbels mrepvywv purais kara Kbomov 
Napumrpdv dywr dos ayvov, ad’ od ce Pdynra Kikd\joxw 
H5€ Ilplymov dvaxta kal ’Avratyny éNikwror. 


2 Bur. Hipp. 1269. 


x] Pythagorean Revivals 647 


of a revival of the like conditions, of course with a difference, 
a resurgence as it were of matriarchal conditions, and with 
it a realization of the appeal of women to the spirit as well as 
the flesh. 

According to Aristoxenus* Pythagoras got most of his 
ethical lore from a woman, Themistoclea, a priestess of Delphi. 
We are reminded of Socrates and Diotima, Diotima the wise 
woman of Mantinea, which has yielded up to us the great inscrip- 
tion dealing with the mysteries of Demeter at Andania’*. We are re- 
minded too of the close friendship between Plutarch and the Thyiad, 
Clea. It was to a woman, his daughter Damo, that Pythagoras 
entrusted his writings with orders to divulge them to no outside 
person. Diogenes further® records with evident surprise that 
men ‘gave their wives into the charge of Pythagoras to learn 
somewhat of his doctrine, and that these women were called 
‘Pythagoreans. Kratinos wrote a comedy on these Pythagorean 
women in which he ridiculed Pythagoras; so we may be sure his 
women followers were not spared. This Pythagorean woman 
movement probably suggested some elements in the ideal state 
of Plato, and may have prompted the women comedies of Aris- 
tophanes. Of a woman called Arignote we learn‘ that ‘she was 
a disciple of the famous Pythagoras and of Theano, a Samian and 
a Pythagorean philosopher, and she edited the Bacchic books 
that follow: one is about the mysteries of Demeter, and the title 
of it is the Sacred Discourse, and she was the author of the Rites of 
Dionysos and other philosophical works. That this matriarchalism 
of Pythagoras was a revival rather than an innovation seems clear. 
Tamblichus? says, ‘ whatever bore the name of Pythagoras bore also 
the stamp of antiquity and was crusted with the patina of 
archaism.’ 

It is not a little remarkable that, in his letter* to the women 
of Croton, Pythagoras says expressly that ‘women as a sex are more 
naturally akin to piety. He says this reverently, not as Strabo’ 
does taking it as evidence of ignorance and superstition. Strabo 


Diog. Laert. Vit. Pyth. v. 

Sauppe, Die Mysterieninschrift von Andania. 

Diog. Laert. Vit. Pyth. xxi. 4 Clem. Al. Strom. tv. 19 § 583. 
Iambl. de Myst. § 247 xapaxrnp madatérporos...dpxaorpémou dé kal maha. 
mivov StadepivTws womep TWds aXELpaTTHTOUV voU mpoomvéovTa. 


® Diog. Laert. Vit. Pyth. 8. 1. 10. 7 Strab. vir. § 297. 


i i 


5 


648 Orphic Cosmogony [ CH. 


in discussing the celibate customs of certain among the Getae 
remarks, ‘all agree that women are the prime promoters of super- 
stition, and it is.they who incite men to frequent worshippings 
of the gods and to feasts and excited celebrations (7roTtvtacpovs).” 
He adds with charming frankness ‘you could scarcely find a man 
living by himself who would do this sort of thing.’ It is to Pytha- 
goras, as has already been noted (p. 262), that we owe the fertile 
suggestion that in the figures of the women goddesses we have 
the counterpart of the successive stages of a woman’s life as Maiden, 
Bride and Mother. 

The doctrine of the Pythagoreans in their lifetime was matri- — 
archal and in their death they turned to Mother Earth. The 
house of Pythagoras’ after his death was dedicated as a sanctuary 
to Demeter, and Pliny? records—significant fact—that the disciples 
of Pythagoras reverted to the ancient method of inhumation long 
superseded by cremation and were buried in pzthoi, earth to 
earth. 





ee 


Eros AS PHANES, PRoTOGONOS, METIS, ERIKAPAIOS. 


The Eros of Athenian poetry and painting is unquestionably 
male, but the Protogonos of esoteric doctrine is not male or female 
but bisexed, resuming in mystic fashion Eros and Aphrodite, 
He is an impossible, unthinkable cosmic potency. The beautiful 
name of Eros is foreign to Orphic hymns. Instead we have Metis, 
Phanes, Erikapaios, ‘ which being interpreted in the vulgar tongue 
are Counsel, Light and Lifegiver’.’ The commentators on Plato are 
conscious of what Plato himself scarcely realizes, that in his™ 
philosophy he is always trying to articulate the symbolism of these 
and other Orphic titles, trying like Orpheus to utter the unutter- 
able ; he puts vods for Metis, ro év for Erikapaios, but, in despair, - 
he constantly lapses back into myth and we have the winged soul, - 
the charioteer, the four-square bisexed man. Proklos* knows that_ 


1 Valer. Max. 8. 15. 1. 

2 Plin. Nat. Hist. xxxvr. 46. 

3 Johannes Malala, Chronogr. Iv. 74 ot dvoua 6 avros Oppers. dxovoas €x TH 
pavrelas é&eire Mari, Pdvynra, ‘Hpixaraioy biep épunveverar TH Kowy yAdoon Bou), 
pos, Swoddrnp. 

4 Prokl. in Plat. Tim. 11. 207 ein dv ratrdov 7d Te IlAdrwvos dv Kal ro ’Opdixd 
wor. 


| xa] The Mystic Eros 649 


vo ov is but the primaeval egg, knows too that Erikapaios was 
male and female’: 


‘Father and Mother, the mighty one Erikapaios,’ 


and Hermias* knows that Orpheus made Phanes four-square : 


“He of the fourfold eyes, beholding this way, that way.’ 


It was ‘the inspired poets, Hermias’ says, ‘not Plato, who 
invented the charioteer and the horses,’ and these inspired poets 
are according to him Homer, Orpheus, Parmenides. 

The mention of Homer comes as something of a shock; but it 
must be remembered that the name Homer covered in antiquity 
a good deal more than our Jliad and Odyssey. It is not unlikely 
that some of the ‘Homeric’ poems were touched with Orphism. 
The name Metis suggests it. The strange denaturalized birth of 
Athene from the brain of Zeus is a dark, desperate effort to make 
thought the basis of being and reality, and the shadowy parent in the 
Kypria is the Orphic Metis. Athene, as has already been shown 
(p. 301), was originally only one of the many local Korae ; she was 
% “A@nvaia (Kopn), the ‘maiden of Athens, born of the earth, as 
much as the Kore of Eleusis. Patriarchalism wished to rid her of 
her matriarchal ancestry, and Orphic mysticism was ready with 
the male parent Metis. The proud rationalism of Athens, uttering 
itself in a goddess who embodied Reason, did the rest. 

There is a yet more definite tinge of Orphism in the story 
of Leda and the swan. Leda herself is all folklore and faery story 
based probably on a cultus-object. In the sanctuary of the 
ancient Maidens Hilaira and Phoebe at Sparta* there hung from 
the roof suspended by ribbons an egg, and tradition said it was the 
ege of Leda. But the author of the Kypria’ gave to Zeus another 
bride, Nemesis, who belongs to the sisterhood of shadowy 
Orphicized female impersonations, Dike, Ananke, Adrasteia and 
the like. The birth of the child from the egg appears on no 
black-figured vase-painting, and though it need not have been 
originated by the Orphics, the birth of Eros doubtless lent it new 


1 Prokl. in Plat. Tim. 11. 130 69us Kai yevérwp Kparepds Beds "Hpcxarraios. 
? Herm. in Plat. Phaedr. p. 135 rerpas 6€ 6 bavys, ds Oppets Pyar 
TeTpaow OPOadmotcw Opwmevos &vOa Kai évGa. 
° Herm. in Plat. Phaedr. p. 125 od wpdros 5¢ 6 UWAdrwy fvioxov Kal tmmous 
mapéhaBev GAG Kal po avToo of evOeo Tav moinrav “Ounpos, ’Opde’s, ILappevidns. 
ole saa dss ae ° Kypria, frg. ap. Athen. vit. § 334. 





650 Orphic Cosmogony rom 


prestige. The charming little design in fig. 176 is from a red- 
figured lekythos in the Berlin Museum’. On an altar lies a huge 
egg. Out of it breaks the figure of a boy. The boy is not winged; 
otherwise we should be inclined to call him Eros. The woman) 


eS e Fas v — 
WW UAL BETO RDI 
——— an “py % as — . 


4 
7, 






Fic. 176. : 
to whom the child stretches out his hands must be Leda. The 
scene is the birth of one of the Dioscuri, but probably with some. 
reminiscence of Eros. On most vases in which the birth from the: 
egg is represented it takes place in a sanctuary. ! 

Homeric theology, as we know it in our canonical Homer, was’ 
wholly untouched by Orphism. The human figures of the Olym- 
pians, clear-cut and departmental as they are, have no kinship; 
with the shifting mystical Protogonos, The Olympians lay no. 
claim to be All in All, nor are they in any sense Creators, sources: 
of life. Homer has no cosmogony, only a splendid ready-made. 
human society. His gods are immortal because death would 
shadow and mar their splendour, not because they are the 
perennial sources of things. It is noticeable that Zeus himself,’ 
the supreme god of Homeric theology, can only be worked into 
the Orphic system by making him become Eros’, and absorb’ 


1 Cat. 2254. Kekulé, Ueber ein griechisches Vasengemiilde im akademischen 
Kunstmuseum zu Bonn, 1879, p. 1. 

* Pherekydes ap. Prokl. in Plat. Tim. m1. 368 6 dé Pepexvdns &reyev els *Epwra 
MeraBeBAHcOa Tov Ala wédAovra Snuoupyew. 


| : x1] The Orphic Pan 651 


| Phanes'; only so can he become demiourgos, a feat which, to do 

| him justice, he never on his own account attempted. Proklos 

| says ‘Orpheus in inspired utterance declares that Zeus swallowed 

| Phanes his progenitor, and took into his bosom all his powers. 
This mysticism was of course made easy by savage cosmogonies of 
Kronos and the swallowing of the children. 

The Olympians concern themselves as little with the Before 
as with the Hereafter; they are not the source of life nor are 
they its goal. Moreover, another characteristic is that they are, 
with the strictest limitations, hwman. They are not one with the 
life that is in beasts and streams and woods as well as in man. 
Eros, ‘ whose feet are on the flowers,’ who ‘couches in the folds,’ is 
of all life, he is Dionysos, he is Pan. Under Athenian influence 
Eros secludes himself into purely human form, but the Phanes?* of 
Orpheus was polymorphic, a beast-mystery-god : 

‘Heads had he many, 
Head of a ram, a bull, a snake, and a bright-eyed lion.’ 
He is like Dionysos, to whom his Bacchants cry*: 


‘ Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name, 

O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, 
Lion of the Burning Flame! 

O God, Beast, Mystery, come !’ 


In theology as in ritual Orphism reverted to the more primi- 
tive forms, lending them deeper and intenser significance. These 
primitive forms, shifting and inchoate, were material more malle- 
able than the articulate accomplished figures of the Olympians. 

The conception of Phanes Protogonos remained always some- 
what esoteric, a thing taught in mysteries, but his content 1s 
popularized in the figure of the goat-god who passed from being 
6 Ildwyv the feeder, the shepherd, to be 70 wav Pan the All-God. 


Pan came to Athens‘ from Arcadia after the Persian War, 
came at a time when scepticism was busy with the figures of the 


1 Prokl. in Plat. Cratyl. p. 66 as 6’Opdeds EvOdw orduate Néyer Kal kaTamiver Tov 
mpoyovoy aro tov Pavyra kal éyxodwifera wacas avrov Tas duvdues o Levs. 

2 Procl. in Plat. Tim. m1. 130 B rovaira yap epi avrod Kal’Opdeds evdeixvuTar Trepi 
Tov Pdyyros BeotoyGv. mp&ros yap 6 Gebs wap’ aitw (aw kepadas Pépet 
4 ToNNas 
; Kptas, Taupelas, Odios xaporrov Te NéovTos, 

kal mpdeicw amd TOD mpwroyevois od, ev OG oTepuaTiKGs TO Cwov éort, and p. 131 E Hd 

kal Oikwrarov wov 6 Beddoyos dvarAdrTe Kptov Kal Tavpov Kai NéovTos Kai SpdKovTos 
_ |atr@ mepifels Kepahds. 


> Eur. Bacch. 1017. * Myth. and Mon. Anc. Athens, p. 538. 


























652 Orphic Cosmogony [c 


Olympians and their old prestige was on the wane. Pan of cours 
had to have his reception into Olympus, and a derivation dul 
Olympian was found for his name. The Homeric Hymn’, eve 
if it be of Alexandrian date, is thoroughly Homeric in religious 
tone: the poet tells how . 


‘Straight to the seats of the gods immortal did Hermes fare 
With his child wrapped warmly up in skins of the mountain hare, 
And down by the side of Zeus and the rest, he made him to sit, 
And showed him that boy of his, and they all rejoiced at it. 
But most of all Dionysos, the god of the Bacchanal, : 
And they called the name of him PAN because he delighted them ALL” 
Dionysos the Bull-god and Pan the Goat-god both belong 
to early pre-anthropomorphic days, before man had cut the ties: 
that bound him to the other animals; one and both they were 
welcomed as saviours by a tired humanity. Pan had no part 
in Orphic ritual, but in mythology as the All-god* he is the popular; 
reflection of Protogonos. He gave a soul of life and reality 
to a difficult monotheistic dogma, and the last word was not said 
in Greek religion, until over the midnight sea a voice* was heard 
crying ‘Great Pan is dead.’ 


Our evidence for the mystic Phanes Protogonos, as distinguished” 
from the beautiful Eros of the Athenians, has been, so far, drawn from 
late and purely learned authors, commentators on Plato, Christian 
Fathers, and the like. The suspicion may lurk in some minds 
that all this cosmogony, apart from the simple myth of the world 
egg vouched for by Aristophanes, is a matter of late mysticizing,, 
and never touched popular religion at all, or if at all, not till the: 
days of decadence. It is most true that ‘the main current of 
speculation, as directed by Athens, set steadily contrariwise, in the 
line of getting bit by bit at the meaning of things through ha d 
thinking, but we need constantly to remind ourselves of the 
important fact ‘that the mystical and “enthusiastic” explanation 
of the world was never without its apostles in Greece’ That 
the common people heard this doctrine gladly is curiously; 
1 Hom. Hym. xrx. 42 trans. by Mr D. 8. MacColl. 

2 The Orphic conception of Pan as All-god was no doubt helped out by the facet 
that as early as the time of Herodotus (1. 46) the analogy was noted between the 
Greek Pan and the Egyptian Mendes, who was both Goat-god and All-god; sé 
Roscher,‘ Pan als Allgott’ in Festschrift f. Overbeck, 1893, p. 56 ff., and for Mendes, 


Roscher, s.v. 
3 Plut. de defect. orac. 17. 4 Murray, Ancient Greek Literature, p. 68. 


“ 


x1] | The Mystic Dionysos 653 


evidenced by the next monument to be discussed, a religious 
document of high value, the fragment of a black-figured vase- 
painting! in fig. 177. 

In the sanctuary of the Kabeiroi near Thebes? there came to 
light a mass of fragments of black-figured vases, dating about the 





Fic. 177. 


end of the 5th or the beginning of the 4th century B.c., of local 
technique and obviously having been used in a local cult. The 
important inscribed fragment is here reproduced. The reclining 
man holding the kantharos, would, if there were no inscription, be 
named without hesitation Dionysos. But over him is clearly 
written Kabiros. 

Goethe makes his Sirens say of the Kabeiroi that they 


‘Sind Gétter, wundersam eigen, ‘ 
Die sich immerfort selbst erzeugen 
Und niemals wissen was sie sind.’ 

They have certainly a wondrous power of taking on the forms 
of other deities; here in shape and semblance they are Dionysos, 
the father and the son. Very surprising are the other inscribed 
figures, a man and a woman closely linked together, Mitos and 
Krateia, and a child Protolaos. What precisely is meant by the 
conjunction is not easy to say, but the names Mitos and Protolaos 


‘take us straight to Orphism. Clement* says in the Stromata 


that Epigenes wrote a book on the poetry of Orpheus and ‘in 
it noted certain characteristic expressions.’ Among them was 
this, that by warp (o77mo0v) Orpheus meant furrow, and by woof 
(uiTos) he meant seed (oc7éppya). 

Did this statement stand alone we might naturally dismiss it 
as late allegorizing, but here, on a bit of local pottery of the 


1 A. Mitth. x11. pl. rx. = Ee wee, 245 Bp 
3 Clem. Al. Strom. v. 8 § 281. 


‘ 


654 Orphic Cosmogony [o 


5th or 4th century B.c., we have the figure of Mitos in popul 
use. All the Theban Kabeiroi vases are marked by a spirit o 
grotesque and sometimes gross caricature. Mitos, Krateia an 
Protolaos it will be noted have snub negro faces. This gives us 
a curious glimpse into that blending of the cosmic and the mystic, - 
that concealing of the sacred by the profane, that seems inherent 
in the anxious primitive mind. It makes us feel that Aristo- 
phanes, to his own contemporaries, may have appeared less fiankl 
blasphemous than he seems to us. 

The vase fragment has another interest. The little Orphic 
cosmogonic group, Seed and Strong One and First people, the birth” 
of the human world as it were, is in close connection with Dionysos, 
the father and the son. It is all like a little popular diagram of 
the relation of Orphic and Bacchic rites, and moreover it comes to. 
us from the immediate neighbourhood of Thebes, the repuiaa 
birthplace of the god. 

The vase fragment from Thebes shows plainly the influence 
of mystery doctrines on popular conceptions of Dionysos. It is 
worth noting that in red-figured vase-paintings of a somewhat 
late style Eros comes to be a frequent attendant on Dionysos, 
whereas in vases of severe style he is wholly absent, Maenads 
and Satyrs revel either together or alone. The design in fig. 179, 
from the lid of a red-figured lekane (fig. 178) in the Museum at 
Odessa’, is a singularly 
beautiful instance of 
Eros as present at a 
Bacchic revel. A Mae- 
nad and a Satyr dance 
in ecstasy, holding be- 
tween them a little 
fawn, as though in the 
act of rending it asun- 
der. Over her long chiton, that trails and swirls about her feet 
in oddly modern fashion, the Maenad wears a fawn-skin; a second 
dancing Maenad strikes her timbrel. One half of the design is all 
ecstasy and even savagery, the other half is perfectly quiet. Two 





1 Reproduced by kind permission of Dr E. von Stern from the Mémoires de la 
Société Impériale @histoire et des antiquités, vol. xvi. pl. 1. The vase was found 
at Kertsch. 


x1 | Bros and Dionysos 655 


Maenads stand talking, at rest; the god Dionysos is seated and Eros 


|offers him the wine-cup. Here it is Eros the son, not Aphrodite 
\the mother, who is linked with Dionysos, but we remember how 
'in the Bacchae of Euripides! the Messenger thus pleads with 
| < 


Pentheus: 

‘Therefore I counsel thee, 
O King, receive this Spirit whoe’er he be 
To Thebes in glory. Greatness manifold 
Is all about him—and the tale is told 
| That this is he who first to man did give 
| The grief-assuaging vine.—Oh, let him live, 
For if he die, then Love herself is slain ; 
And nothing joyous in the world again.’ 





3 
> 
D} 
D) 


2, 
ROTC 





LT DIDS 

Fic. 179. 
- ‘ 
| Eros and Dionysos, the poet sees, are near akin; both are 
ispirits of Life and of Life’s ecstasy. 
A 


1 Kur. Bacch. 769. 


656 Orphic Cosmogony [ CH. 


Dionysos like Eros is a daimon, a spirit rather than a clear-cut 
erystallized god; he is as has been already seen of many shapes, 
of plants and aun as well as man, so he like Eros becomes 


Phanes: 


‘Therefore him we call both Phanes and Dionysos1’ 


Dionysos is but a new ingredient in the monotheistic mystery 
melting-pot : . 


‘One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, one Dionysos, 
Yea in all things One God, his name why speak I asunder? ?’ 


In becoming the Orphic Phanes Dionysos lost most of his 
characteristics. In spite of his persistent monotheism we are 
somehow conscious that Orpheus did not feel all the gods to be 
really one, all equal manifestations of the same potency. He is 
concerned to push the claims of the cosmic Eros as against 
the simpler wine god. Possibly he felt that Dionysos needed 
much adjustment and was not always for edification. Of this 
we have some hint in the last literary document to be examined. 


In the statutes of the Iobacchoi’ at Athens, we have already 
seen (p. 476), the thyrsos became the symbol not of revel but of quiet 
seemliness, We shall now find that though by name and tradition — 
they are pledged to the worship of Dionysos the Iobacchoi have 
introduced into their ceremonies a figure more grave and orderly, 
a figure bearing in the inscription a name of beautiful significance, 
Proteurhythmos. A part of their great festival consisted in a 
sacred pantomime, the rdles in which were distributed by lot. The 


sete et i te Ciel 


oo at A tl lI ha. et ES oe 


divine persons represented were ‘Dionysos, Kore, Palaimon, — 
Aphrodite, and Proteurhythmos‘. Who was Proteurythmos, First ; 
of fair rhythm? The word defies translation into English, but its— 
initial syllable zpwr, first, at once inclines us to see in it an Orphic 


2) Diod. Sics Tule EdpoXrros bev év trois Baxxixots &reol pnow 'Acrpopay 
Avévucov év axtivesor mupwrév. ’Opdeds be 
© Totveka pay Kadéovor Pdvnrd te Kal Acévucor.’ 
2 Justinus, Cohort. ec. 15 cat av@is d\XNaxo0 ov ol'rws Neyer 
els Lets, els Atdns, els “HXuos, els Acévucos, 
els Beds é€v mavrecor’ th ox diya Tair’ ayopetw; 
3 Dr Sam. Wide, A. Mitt. xrx. 1894, p. 248 ff. 
+ Tnser. line 120 Mepay dé yewoueveov alpérw lepeds dvOcepevs, dpx(Paxxos Taplas, | 
BovxoNixds, Acdvucos, Képn, Hadaiuwv, ’Appodelrn, IpwretipuOmos, ra 6€ dvduata alray” 
ouwvKkdA\npovtow mace. 


bi 
x1] Eros Proteurhythmos 657 


title like Protogonos or Protolaos. The word has indeed been 
interpreted? as a title of Orpheus himself, Orpheus Proteurhythmos, 
First dancer or singer. Such an interpretation argues, I think, 
a grave misunderstanding. It ignores the juxtaposition of Prot- 
eurhythmos with Aphrodite and rests for support on the initial 
error that Orpheus himself is a faded god. Proteurhythmos is, 
{I think, not Orpheus, but a greater than he, the god whom he 
worshipped, Eros Protogonos. Orpheus is a musician, but it was 
Eros, not Orpheus, who gave impulse and rhythm to the great 
dance of creation when ‘the Morning Stars sang together.’ Eros, 
not Orpheus, is demiourgos. 

Lucian? knew this. ‘It would seem that dancing came into 
being at the beginning of all things, and was brought to light 
together with Eros, that ancient one, for we see this primaeval 
dancing clearly set forth in the choral dance of the constellations, 
and in the planets and fixed stars, their interweaving and inter- 
change and orderly harmony.’ 

It is the primaeval life that Eros, not Orpheus, begets within 
us, that wakes now and again, that feels the rhythm of a poem, 
the pulse of a pattern and the chime of a dancer’s feet. 

‘In the beginning when the sun was lit 
The maze of things was marshalled to a dance. 


Deep in us lie forgotten strains of it, 
Like obsolete, charmed sleepers of romance. 


And we remember, when on thrilling strings 
And hollow flutes the heart of midnight burns, 

The heritage of splendid, moving things 
Descends on us, and the old power returns.’ 


Eros is Lord of Life and Death, he is also Proteurhythmos, but 
because of the bitter antinomy of human things to man he is also 
Lord of Discord and Misrule. And therefore the chorus in the 
Hippolytus*, brooding over the sickness and disorder of Phaedra, 
prays: 

‘When I am thine, O Master, bring thou near 


No spirit of evil, make not jarred the clear 
Wings’ music as thou fliest.’ 





1 E. Maass, Orpheus, p. 64. The theory that Orpheus is a god seems to me to 
vitiate much of Dr Miaae' s interesting and valuable book. 

2 Lucian De Salt. 7 § 271...kal e}pv@ mos air&v Kowwvia Kai ebraKxTos apuovia THs 
TpwrToydvou dpxncews Seiyuatd éort. 

3 Hur. Hipp. 527. 


H. 42 


658 Orphic Cosmogony [c 



















The gods whose worship Orpheus taught were two, Bacchus 
and Eros; in actual religion chiefly Bacchus, in mystical dogm 
Eros, and in ancient Greek religion these are the only real gods, 
Orpheus dimly divined the truth, later to become explicit through 
Euripides of Phlya: 

‘T saw that there are first and above all . 
The hidden forces, blind necessities 

Named Nature, but the things self-unconceived. 

We know not how imposed above ourselves, ; 
We well know what I name the god, a power 
Various or one.’ i 

Through all the chaos of his cosmogony and the shifting, 
uncertain outlines of his personifications, we feel, in these two 
gods, lies the real advance of the religion of Orpheus—an advance, 
not only beyond the old riddance of ghosts and sprites and demons, - 
but also beyond the gracious and beautiful service of those magni- 
fied mortals, the Olympians. The religion of Orpheus is religious 
in the sense that it is the worship of the real mysteries of life, of 
potencies (Saiyoves) rather than personal gods (@eot); it is the 
worship of life itself in its supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love, 
“ Reason is great, but it 1s not everything. There are in the world 
things, not of reason, but both below and above it, causes of emotion 
which we cannot express, which we tend to worship, which we feel 
perhaps to be the precious things in life. These things are God or 
forms of God, not fabulous immortal men, but ‘ Things which Are, 
things utterly non-human and non-moral which bring man he or 
tear his life to shreds without a break in their own serenity’. 

It is these real gods, this life itself, that the Greeks, like most | 
men, were inwardly afraid to recognize and face, afraid even to 
worship. Orpheus too was afraid—the garb of the ascetic that he> 
always wears is the token at once of his realization and his fear 
but at least he dares to worship. Now and again a philosopher o 
a poet, in the very spirit of Orpheus, proclaims these true gods, 
and asks in wonder why to their shrines is prongs no sacrifice. | 
Plato® in the Symposium makes Aristophanes say,‘ Mankind woul 
seem to have never realized the might of Eros, for if they had 
really felt it they would have built him great sanctuaries and 
altars and offered solemn sacrifices, and none of these things are 


1 Murray, Ancient Greek Literature, p. 272. 
2 Plat. Symp. 189. 


pe 
x] Orphism resumed | 659 


done, but of all things they ought to be done.’ Euripides? in the 
Hippolytus makes his chorus sing : 


‘In vain, in vain by old Alpheus’ shore, 
The blood of many bulls doth stain the river, 
And all Greece bows on Phoebus’ Pythian floor, 
Yet bring we to the Master of Man no store, 
The Keybearer that standeth at the door 
Close barred, where hideth ever 
Love’s inmost jewel. Yea, though he sack man’s life, 
Like a sacked city and moveth evermore, 
Girt with calamity and strange ways of strife, 
Him have we worshipped never.’ 





To resume: the last word in ancient Greek religion was said 
by the Orphics, and the beautiful figure of Orpheus is strangely 
modern. Then, as now, we have, for one'side of the picture, 
a revived and intensified spirituality, an ardent, even ecstatic 
enthusiasm, a high and self-conscious standard of moral conduct, 
a deliberate simplicity of life; abstinence from many things, 
temperance in all, a great quiet of demeanour, a marvellous 
gentleness to all living things. 

And, for the reverse, we have formalism, faddism, priggishness, 
a constant, and it would seem inevitable lapse into arid symbolism, 
pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy, the ignorant revival of obsolete 
rites, the exhibition of all manner of ignoble thaumaturgy and 
squalid credulity. The whole strange blend redeemed, illuminated 
by two impulses, in practice by the strenuous effort after purity 
of life, in theory by the ‘further determination of the Absolute’ 
into the mysticism of Love. 


1 Eur. Hipp. 535. 


.o aia 


CRITICAL APPENDIX ON THE ORPHIC 
TABLETS. 


I. The Petelia Tablet. 


Found in excavations near Petelia, 8. Italy: now in the British Museum. 
Kaibel, CJGIS, No. 638. Cf. Comparetti, JAS. m1. p. 112. 


FY PHZZE1Z Ap 1AAQAoM NEMA PISTE PAKP HN 
HNPAP AAYTH IAEY KHNEETH K YIANKVIA PisSon = 
TAY THE THERD HU HEMHOESAEAONEMME AAS EAE S 
EYPHZE's 4ETEPAN 

YY XPON An 

EINEINSH E HA 


OMEN 6% OYPA 





EYPHSSEIZ AN AIAAO AOMOQN ETT APIZTEPA KPHNHN, 
TIAP A’ AYTHI AEYKHN ESTHKYIAN KYTTAPIZSON- 
TAYTH= THS KPHNHE MHAE SXEAON EMITTEAASEIAS. 
EYPHSEIS A’ ETEPAN TH? MNHMOSYNH2 ATTO AIMNHS 
YYXPON YAQP TIPOPEON, ®YAAKES A’ ETTITTPOZOEN EASINA 
EITTEIN: FHS TIAIS EIMI KAl OYPANOY ASTEPOENTOS, | 
AYTAP EMOI TENOZ OYPANION: TOAE A ISTE KAI AYTOI: 
AIYHI A EIMI AYH KAI ATTOAAYMAI: AAAA AOT?’ AIVA 
YYXPON YAQP TTPOPEON THE MNHMOZSYNHE ATTO AIMNH® 
KAYT(OI =O)l| ANSTOYS! TEIN OEIHS ATO AIMN)HE 
KAI TOT’ ETTEIT’ ACAAOIZI MEO’) HPOESSIN ANAZSEIS 
vA Te, lan po Wa aperer QANEISOLe ck 

Ba Belsci nn» TOA eae a 

-+++ FAQZEITIA (2)--- TKOTOZT AMPIKAAY VAS 





‘Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring, 
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. 
To this Well-spring approach not near, 


Appendix 661 


But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory, 

-Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it. 

Say: “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven ; 

But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves. 

And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly 
The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.” 

And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy Well- ale ing 
And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lor dship... 


Kaibel (l.c.) says “pertinet lammina, ut nune apparet, ad saeculum iii vel 
summum iv ante Chr. n.” It had formerly been supposed to be much later. He 
confidently attributes the accompanying tablet (No. V.) to the fourth century, 
and this one seems to me to be quite as early or earlier. It is altogether more 
carefully written, which detracts from its appearance of age. The use of the 
diphthong ov for instance, where No. V. has o, is probably a sign of careful 
writing, not of lateness. The letters are very well formed and early in shape. 
Subscript « is never neglected. LElision only once (eiui avn), and then, it would 
seem, of set purpose to avoid ambiguity. Weight must also be allowed to 
the completeness and accuracy with which the text of the “ancient Orphic 
poem ” (see below on No. V.) is given, with no compendia or corruptions. The 
- dialect, also, is pure literary epic; ie., one may presume, the pure dialect of 
the “ancient poem ” itself, with no admixture of local forms such as have crept 
by process of time into the formulae on the other tablets. The double o of 
evpnooes in |. 1 may indeed be dialectical; cf. doorepoBdAra, Aeoomoivas in 
Y., but that scarcely affects the main impression. 


Ul. Three tablets from Crete (Eleuthernae ?) now in the National Museum 
at Athens. 


a 





DIVAIBY oc AAS Fe K/ Lape ApYMAIAN A ATIEMING 
KPAN Ac AIENAWECNIAC IATHKYPAP\' ET OS 







TIS Ac ZIPwbE ZIFACYVigc HMIK AL Ol'ANn 
ACT€ PoEn TOC 





Length 55 mm.; breadth 7 mm. 


B. 


AIYAIAYOCETWK ALANOMYM AMALAMAT IE MOY 
KPANACAIEIPAWENISZE = ATH KY A PI TOC 


TICAEZTINWAECTITACYICCH MikAirwPANw 
PGC? de oe Pitot oer IN Hold 


Length 62 mm.; breadth 8 mm. 


662 Appendix 


C. 


QIYAIA¥YOCE ND KAKA POMYMAIAMAPIEMS! 


K PANAZAIGIPOWENIAGCZIATHKY DAP] TOC 


TICAERINWOE TI MACTICCHMI KA OPANY 
AcT € paecn 7 oc 


Length 56 mm.; breadth 10 mm. 


The general formula represented by these tablets is : 


Aivrat ados eya Kal amodAvpar— AXA Tie pov 
Kpavas aiepow [or alevaw] émi Seka, rH Kupdpicos. 
TLLGMOMMECU SS st ccehocteeeeune tee 


a > »~ an «X roe. ‘ > ~ > / 
m@ © €or;...Tas vids nul Kal @pav@ dorepoertos. 


‘I am parched with thirst and I perish.—Nay, drink of Me, 

The well-spring flowing for ever on the Right, where the Cypress is. 
Whor art thou ?..:.....s6<00.004. 

Whence art thou ?—I am son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.’ 


Tablet C was published, with some inaccuracies, by M. Joubin in Bull. de 
Corr. fell. xvii. p. 122, where it is said to have been found at Eleuthernae 
in Crete. I subjoin an account of the three tablets kindly sent by Mr Marcus — 
Tod, Assistant Director of the British School at Athens, to whom are also due 
the above fac-similes. 

“The inscription is at present in the Lthnikon Mouseion here, and along — 
with it are two others almost exactly similar. I could get no information about 
them, save that they also, according to the Evpernpiov of the Museum, are — 
‘from Crete.” All three are on thin strips of gold, roughly rectangular, and 
are traced in very small and fine letters with a needle point. The execution is — 
in all three instances rough, but C is considerably better in this respect than 
A; B holds an intermediate position. I worked with a powerful magnifying — 
glass, and in most cases am quite sure of my readings even where I differ from 
Bull. Corr, Hell.” 

Norss: 1. 1. What comes between avos and eyo in A, Mr Tod cannot — 
decipher. Was it avos written twice ? ( 

me por C: me pov B (and C, according to Joubin). I had conjectured from 
Joubin’s reading mie ppov, the initial » being doubled as in evi pyeyaporw, ete., 
in the so-called Aeolic poetry (Cretan= Arcadian =‘ Urgriechisch’), and this 
proves to be the reading of A. 

1.2. atecpow C and B. Joubin gave aiei pew: avevaw A. Evidently the 
Dorie genitive of an adj. aigpoos or aiévaos. Mr Tod (and I also) had con- 
jectured aié péw, and he would also take aievadw as a verb. 

TH Kupapioos : SC. eari. 

As to the metre and reading of the last line, see below p, 672. 


=," 





Appendix 663 


Ill. Timpone Grande Tablet (a). 


A thin rectangular slip of gold, like the others, found in a large tomb in 
the commune of Corigliano-Calabro, 8. Italy. (Published in the Atti d. R. 
Accad. dei Lincei, Serie 111. 1878-79; Memorie, p. 328: cf. Kaibel, CIGZS, 
642.) The fac-simile that follows was kindly furnished by Prof. Comparetti. 


AN ACOT ANY YX HT PONT HI A O£AEA Lolo 
SPEIONE Word © ALI TINAHEP YAAPM ENON 

E YMAAALIANT A & Al PE HA GS2NTOTIAONH * 
MATUAN TIAL OF OL EME TWO SOLE] 
EMOYES ANOF SR 77T0YE PYECLEZTANA 
ETHETEZ (AIPXAIPEA EEIANOA S/N 
AEIM RNAS TE/E POYEKABAALEA 
gELE NESAS 


"ANN ororan Wux7 Tpodimne aos deioto 
defcov ev-ovas Sectiva 
, 9 
eee mepuraypévov ed pada ravta. 
Xaipe raav ro raOnua, TOO ovmw tpocbe emerovOets. 
Geos eyévov €& avOperov. 
* > , + 
épudos es yaha éreres. 
xatpe, xaipe, SeEvay odourop<av> 


- > LA 
Neavas Te tepovs Kata <T > &<A>cea Peae<ho>vetas. 


‘But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun, 


RE EON goo aan since Sg cas heaicguagnsibnseaasss of Ennoia 

iihen must man............... being right wary in all things. 

Hail, thou who hast suffered the Suffering. This thou hadst never suffered 
before. 


Thou art become God from Man. A kid thou art fallen into milk. 
Hail, hail to thee journeying on the right......... 
...Holy meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.’ 


1.2. The reading is doubtful. The strip of gold has been folded over 
and over, making eight little divisions by vertical lines and four by horizontal. 
The curious thing is that in some cases the fold has been allowed for in the 
writing, in others not. For instance, the first vertical fold would cut, as a rule, 
the seventh or eighth letter from the beginning. A large space has been left 
for it between ¢& and dvOperov in line 5 (the gold is worn into a little hole at 
this point, and may have been somehow injured before the writing was made) ; 
and in lines 1, 3, 4 and 7 the letters successfully dodge it. But the x of xatpe 
is half obliterated, and the letter following ¢ in 1. 2 is lost in a mass of 
crumpled gold. It might be EIOIAS=joias, supposing a space to be vacant 
in the crumple, as between ¢€ and avOpam0v. But ENOIA® is the most 
probable, standing presumably for ENNOIAS. The following word has gener- 
ally been read as AEI, though AEI is equally probable. 

1.3. 108 otm@: 167 ove coni. Kaibel. 


664 Appendix 








eyévov. The y is clear. 
As to the interpretation of l. 2, we may accept Kaibel’s judgment: “videtur 
versus ex duobus coaluisse : nam hoc quoque carmen ex antiquiore archetype 
derivatum est.” But any attempt to restore the original “carmen antiquum ” 
is utterly uncertain. How uncertain, it may be worth while illustrating from a 
parallel instance. 
There is a small oval Christian amulet (C7GZS 2413, 18) containing verses 
from an elegiac poem of Gregory Nazianzene in an abbreviated form. One 
passage, for instance, runs in the original 
Xpuotos avak KéXetal oe uyeiv és Aaitwa Oadacons 
ne KaTa oxoréh@v é cuav ayedny, 
ws Aeyedva mapoiev atacGadov. 


This appears on the amulet (I divide the words) : 
Xo ava& kéderé oe huyev eo étpa Oadacons 
€ @ oxoTéAo@y € Guo any 
c , > / 
® e€€va Tapo. atdcGador. 


The accented letter alone, or the first and last, or a group of letters in the 
middle are made to stand for a word. On this principle we might find in 


AEITINA 
Ae&wov, Evvoias Aeonoivas tdatt Nipvas 
or various other formulae built up in the same manner. (I mark the letters 
which occur, not those which are omitted.) 
But, is this the process that has taken place at all? The same amulet, 
a few lines earlier, in place of 
pedy am euarv perewy, heiy am e€uov Biorov, 
Koy, Opt, mUp, BeAudp, Kakin, pope 
gives 
gery am euov peréwv ode mip Bedtap Kakin pope 
through mere lipography, the writer’s eye having wandered from @ to w. 
On this principle we may here be dealing with an original such as 


, > 
AeEwov, “Evvoias dei twa rooot déperOar 


Ul cal , a 
XpyusmTopevoy Kpavas, meudaypévoy ev pada wavTa. 


Such conjectures are merely illustrative. The basis of sound conclusion 
seems to be that we have here fragments of formulae, not a complete sentence. 
(See below p. 672.) 

The word de£ov must, I think, certainly bear its ordinary meaning “ right,” 
“on the right”: cf. 1. 6 deéav ddouropay, and, for the syntax, Seéids aiéas vmép 
doreos Q 320; &de xataoras, dekws, dOavarois Ocoiow érevxopevos Theogn. 943. 
“On the right, by the Spring of Ennoia” means, perhaps “by the Spring of 
Thought issuing from the Lake of Memory.” 

Such a sense would suit the doctrines of tablets I. and II., and might even 
help to explain the origin of Dante’s Zunoé. (Professor Comparetti, who takes 
decoy in the metaphorical prose sense of “clever,” considers the introduction 
of such a word to be due to Euripidean or sophistic influence.) 


Appendix 665 


IV. Timpone Grande Tablet (6). 


NPA TOTONOTHMAITLE THTAMM @TR) ENAKYBEAEIAKOPPA ¥& FN TAINAHM HY POE Hr 
TATAITTATAM TALE Y PATHTY AEP E ATTAHA IE NYEAHMAN TAL THIPV TAZ THM KATOTIE V/ KAIL 
EHAET YXAN EG ANHSIIAMMH EUS AND fi AIE ETHTOITANMY ARTANTH £YKAH TEDAMMONAE 
EMATPAT!<IANTAA A MALTAPAN TH PAY YN TAISEAABAON TALEMIANIEMO! BAT ZTAHTE ATIA 
THMHA EPI MYOMEMMALEDAY EET! & WANETITA TONHELIN IY VE (NHMEO HME PANTAY VE 
mTliaa Pri sft IALTANLEYEN U PY 7 TIE KAIHANGIITAAIENA M1 | YPRAA T ELOMA CET 
IAYEFI EBEYY AS TAKTATIY POR VAKA TIER JOY AM HT AMON KAY NA APA AA MAYA A MYY/ 
HOTEY AMA DI EIAINTE RYLEY KET A XCLBA T. Ae IH TPOEH ME 7 HOPTEL 

Wels NH YN NA FE TEN AMATS M HT YN THEN N bm MELTOP(M 6 / <P HM 

A iHp—anossK  TOAAEFTAIT YH PAREN A/AA / 


Prof. Comparetti examined the tablet when it was discovered in 1879, and 
reported (Notizie d. Scavi, 1880, p. 328) that it contained names of divinities 
belonging to the Orphic theology. Of these he then read Protogonos, Gé, 
Pammiétor, Kybelé, Koré, Démétér and Tyché. For his later results we must 
await his publication and discussion of the new fac-simile which, by his kind- 
ness, is reproduced above. Prof. Diels published the tablet with a full 
discussion in 1902 (Hin Orphischer Demeter-Hymnus, Festschrift Theodor 
Gomperz, p. 1). He also with great kindness has allowed his photographs of 
the tablet to be used for the purposes of the present book. 

I examined the tablet itself in the Naples Museum and was able here and 
there to make out a few more letters than Prof. Diels ; but, as it evidently did 
not contain any special Orphic doctrines, and was besides very trying to the 
eyes, I did not attempt a complete transcript. This note is based chiefly on 
Prof. Comparetti’s fac-simile. 

That the tablet is unintelligible as it stands, no one will deny. It seems 
indeed to belong to that class of magical or cryptic writings in which, as 
Wiinsch puts it, “singulari quadam scribendi ratione id agitur ne legi possint.” 

Prof. Diels, however, did not view it in this light. He adopted the hypo- 
thesis that the tablet was the simple and bond fide work of an Apulian engraver 
who knew very little Greek, but was copying a Greek original which already 
contained various readings. He often got his letters down in the wrong order ; 
often mistook one letter for another; often tried to correct his mistakes by 
repeating words or syllables. 

Much of this seems perfectly true. Cf. for transpositions toeAaBporra 


» , U > v 
=ehaciB8povra, poamia = capam, mtev auata=névT Gpuata, patieTn = pytieta, 





c , lad ¢ 
oveuTaw = oain mais (?). 
Confusions: tAraitratarra Zed (=navrorra? or drra, iara written back- 
ward ?), so mavvvayravrns, if that is what is written, must be an attempt to 
get some word right by repeated correction. 


Ignorance of Greek : Havorra=Tlavorra, emitinpap = éxtjpap are typical, but 
the above transpositions and confusions point to the same conclusion. On the 
other hand, there is knowledge of the Greek alphabet, as is shown by the 
varying shapes of many letters, e.g. 5, p [sometimes R], x [sometimes P], and 
the use of compendia: cf. especially the curious compounds with N. 

Prof. Diels, however, goes a good deal further than this. He attempts to 
shew that the original from which the tablet is copied is a Hymn to Demeter, 
written in hexameters; and he proceeds to its conjectural reconstruction— 


666 Appendix ; 

4 
while observing that “ Viemand die Unsicherheit der Ergdnzung verkennen 
oder die Barbarei der Formen beanstanden wird.” 

The conjecture was worth making, and is carried out with the learning andl 
ability which mark all Prof. Diels’s work. So it is less surprising than it would — 
otherwise be, to find the tablet described by scholars, without further quali- 
fication, as a Demeter-hymnus! But it remains a highly improbable hypo-— 
thesis, not only because of the violent changes necessary to get any consecutive 
sense suitable to a Demeter-hymnus, but more definitely because among the 
few really legible passages in the tablet, the very clearest are certainly not in— 
dactylic metre ; vvEiv 7) peO’ nyépay, inrpos “Hdte, eveAnte daipov. True, there 
are fragments also which seem dactylic ; pedp’ doraxra mupos, Nikats nd€ TUyas 
epavns maupndeor Moipas(?). But this need not surprise us. The words of a 
charm, for instance, are sometimes found set in the midst of a hexameter 
verse ; cf. the Tanagra Tablet in Wiinsch, App. CTA, Praef. p. viii: 

‘Epp kixkjnoxw xOov.ov 


(karadiénus Acovvaiar) 
kal Pepaedovnav. (dnoae Aco- 
vuolas yA@oav Kri.) 

This parallel would account easily for all the hexameter fragments that we 
have in this tablet. 

On the other hand, the strange corruptions and repetitions of the tablet are 
more than can be explained by the mere ignorance of a copy-maker. They i 
are not indeed similar to the rows of abracadabra-like syllables found in magical — 
papyri (cf. Dieterich, Abraxas, p. 178 6n80v6n aabw abnpovwpapia bap pvyapvay-— 
oupe krd.), but they do bear a fairly close resemblance to some of the cryptic 
curses, in which, as said above, the writing is deliberately confused by trans- 
positions and the like, so as to be unintelligible. Cf. Wiinsch, 110: 


i 
4 
TTPO TONQSTTEPTAYTAANATI OT AE KAITOSAFOPAIASTIPATO . 
NANATIAEHATIATAKAIHMAIOITOISTOIZSTIMATI ITATOTTOAE 


TOITTAPATIPQ.TOIOTOKAIOTOTTIQAOTIKANAEKAIAYTOS KAITH 
THXNH 


(IIparov dorrep TUT. = Fs oUtws Kal 0 ’Apiorayopas..... then at the end 
katadéw (?) avrovs kal TH TEXVNV.) 


TOZSATOPAIAS =o ’Apiorayopas is just like what we find in our tablet, and | 
examination will show many other resemblances. 

I have here attempted no reconstruction. I have merely copied the 
inscription and tried to collect such intelligible words or phrases as presented 
themselves at once or were to be reached by very slight emendations. The 
result so obtained is a patchwork of a few ritual phrases and fragmentary 
formulae; rows of titles of gods, heroes and daemons, including possibly Phanes 
and certainly Rhadamanthys; and lastly, an unintelligible residuum. 

The whole seems to be a charm of some kind, concerned with healing and 
fasting. I can find no signs of its being a curse ; nor indeed was gold, unless 
I am mistaken, used for writing curses. The long lists of titles of gods can be 
paralleled in abundance from magical inscriptions and papyri. 






1 E.g. Maass, Die Tagesgitter, p. 288. 





Appendix 667 


Transcript : 


TIPO TOTONOTHMAITIETHTAMMATPIETIAKY BEAEIAKOPPAOS 
ENTAINAHMHTPOSHT | 


| TATATITATATITAZEYIATHTYAEPSATTIAHAIETTY PAYHIANTAST 


HIANTAZS THNKATOTIENIKAII 
SHAETYXAITEPANHSTIAMMH -EOIMOIPAISSTHTOIFANNYAN 
ANTHSYKAHTEAAIMONAE 
STTATPIATI - TANTAAAMASTAPANTHPNYNTAISEAABPONTA 
AETTANIEMOIBNTSTAHTEATIA 
- THMHAEPITTYOMEMMAIEPAYESTIZ -- A+ ETTTATONHESIN 
NY=INHMEOHMEPANET(Q - - - 
ETTITIHMAPTINN - = - IAZSTANZEYENOPYTTIEKAIHANOTITA 
AIENAMINAMATEIOMAS ETT 
-TIIAYSE!L- EREYMASTAKTATIYPOS - AKATTEAIONAMHIEMON 
KANNAAIEPAAAMANOYAAMNY | 
PAS THOTE=AMAPIE --- NTEAPFIZEYKETH=EIAA --- TPAB-- 
IHTPOSHAISTIIONTEI 
HI: OSNHPSYNNAOZSESTITENAMATAMHTHN -- THENNZSYM 
MEZTOPEME -- 2LPHM 
mAs ---HP---NOSS-:::-: EYTOAAEPTAI - MYH - PAENA 
INAI 
Ilpwroyove Ty Myriera mapparpteia (?) KuBeXela Koppa, doin pais (?) Anuntpos 
nrarat (?) ratanra (=mavtonra?) Zev “lary, tv b€ Sapami(?) “Hdse Tupavn av- 
tact pavtacty éxato--te(?) Nixa ton d€ Tuya: tre barns maypngtroe Motpa [or 
Nikats BLY: TUxats ehavns mappndeot Moipas] Srjtor(?) wavravyctai(?) evxAnre 
Aaipov dSéorota “larn(?) mavrodayacta mavtypyvyta (=ravroxparuyta ?) é€Xact- 
Bpovra Speman (7) --+-- TAntréa TavtTn. My cépi ri@p’ eu pot éqavns, (?) riaw---- 
énrarévnotw. Nv&w 7) ped” juepav eyo:--- émtnwap thy vnotiactyy(?) Zev évo- 
purtie kat gavomta Sie vaparuate (?)--- exmiddcere pedp dorakra Tupos +++ Kar 
meOiov (?)--+ nyepov:-+-- die “PadduavOu------- efapap-:--- Zev «++ Aa(ua)rpa--- 
intpos “HAce (2) -++- e+e eee as (a)v 1 ovvvaos TévT Guata py-++++++-: ouppmn- 
rope (2) +++ wpnyesssserr eee e cence 
One might translate tentatively: “O First-Born, Earth, Counsellor, AIl- 
Motherly, Cybelean, Kora, Holy Child of Demeter(?)......, All-Seeing Zeus, Healer, 
and thou Sarapis, Sun, Fire-Kindler, Maker-of-Appearances, Far-Seeing (??) 
Victory and equal Fortune; come ye, Phanes, All-Counselling Fates (or 
With victories and Fortunes thou didst appear, with the All-Devising Fates) 
Stayers (?), All-Accomplishers (?), Well-named Daemon, Master, Healer (7), 
All-Subduer, All-Controller, Driver of Thunder, Sickle-Bearer (?), ............ to be 
endured in all wise. That thou mayest not with vapour make to burn a 
tumour in me (??) ... I will pay ... sevenfold fasting. In the nights or after 
daybreak | ...... for seven days the fasting. 
Zeus Penetrator (?) and All-seeing, Divine, Ruler of Streams, ... ye will 
make to spring a stream not in drops of fire......... 
IPAM... : guide ... Divine Rhadamanthys...... for six days...... DUS cera 
Demeter ...... Healer, Sun ...... ; that She sharing the Shrine for five 
Mays may not.............-.... Z 


668 Appendix 


V., VI. and VII. Zhe Compagno Tablets. 

Published Notizie degli Scavi, 1880. Cf. Kaibel, CZGIS, 481, a, 6, c. 
These three tablets were found on the estate of the Baron Compagno, near 
Naples, not far from the Timpone Grande. The tablets were close to the hand 


of the skeleton in each case. 


V. Compagno Tablet (a). 


FOMAIE MK 6 OA POKOOAVAX OOM BA 
ZINEIAEVKAH ZEVBONE VETERAIA 
OANATO!IQEO/|AAADIKA! SARE TS 

NMAN FEN OLZOABIONEVFOMA. 
FIMENAAAMEM O PAED AMAZE 

KAIAGANAT OI OF OL AAA O/ KAIAZ - 
ETECOBAHTA k F PAVNON KVKAO 
DEZEPTANRAPVIEV OE OZ APTA 
AE OI DIMEPTOAERE BANZTEGA 
NOPOLIKAPNPA A IMO £/SEELS 

NAELEYNOKO ATION FEA VN KOOM 
AL BALIAGIALIME PTOLA LE BAN 
ITEMANOPOLI KAP FALIM OF 

LONGI E KAIMAKAPIETE OE OLAE - 
MANTIBPO TOOEPIQOLELSAA & TE TO 





















EPXOMAI EK KOOAPON, KOOAPA XOONI(wn) BASIAEIA, 
EYKAHS EYBOAEYS TE KAI AOANATOI OEOI AAAOI. 

KAI FAP ETON YMOQN FENOZ OABION EYXOMA() EIMEN, 
AAA ME MOPA EAAMAZE KAI AOANATOI OEO! AAAOI 
Baaest © ‘ane KA] ASSTEPOBAHTA KEPAYNON. 

KYKAO A E=ETITAN BAPYTTENOEOS APIAAEOIO: 

IMEPTO A’ ETTEBAN STE®ANO TTOS!I KAPTTAAIMOISI: 
AESSTIOINAS AE YITO KOATTION EAYN XOONIAS BASIAEIAS 
IMEPTO A ATTEBAN STEMANO TIO! KAPTTAZIMOISI. 
OABIE KAI MAKAPISTE, OEOS A’ ESHI ANTI BPOTOIO. 
ErIPO> E>) PAA EMDETON: 

Kaibel remarks with regard to these three documents: “ Fuit aliquando 
Saeculo Quarto antiquius apud Sybaritas carmen, quod Orphico, ut ita dicam, 
dicendi genere conceptum lamminis aureis inscriptum defunctorum corporibus 
imponi solebat, quo ipsi vitae ante actae quasi testimonio fidei deorum in- 
ferorum commendarentur. Quod carmen cum in usum sepulcrorum saepius 
describeretur, sensim corrumpebatur et in brevius redigebatur, omissis aliis, 
aliis additis, pluribus denique mutatis, ut tamen primaria indoles non oblitte- 
raretur. Tria nune exempla inventa sunt....Antiquius primum est, quod ad IV 
a. Chr. n. saeculum referri iubet ipsa ratio orthographica (KYKAO, IMEPTO, — 
STE®ANO) sed haud ita multo recentiora reliqua duo, quod docet scripturae — 
genus simillimum.” 

The letters are ancient and well formed, approaching more closely to those — 
of fourth and fifth century inscriptions than to the papyrus of, say, Timotheus. 

1. 1. The form xo@apés is dialectical. It occurs in Elean and Thurian in- 
scriptions, e.g. the Heraclean Tables. Contrast this peculiarity with the style — 
of Tablet I. 

1 punctuate after codapov: “I come from the Pure, O Pure Queen,” not 
“Pure I come from the Pure, O Queen.” The rhythm of the line points 
strongly to this. Only by a definite system of punctuation, such as did not 





Appendix 669 


exist in ancient Greek, could you in such a sentence make a reader pause 
elsewhere than in the natural pause of the metre. The sense is: “I come from 
the Orphically-initiated, O Queen of the Orphically-initiated.” 

3, 4, 5, 8. etuer, Mopa (=Moipa: cf. the next tablet), doorepoBdAjra, Aeo- 
| oroivas are all dialectical forms. 
7and 9. Observe the difference of reading. V.9 is wrong in creuavo and 
| capracipoot, 80 dreBar, in itself an interesting variant, must be suspected to 
be mere mistake also. 


VI. Compagno Tablet (6). 


A 
FOB 
Pr 





=PXOMA E KAPQLIS XONQLN KAOAPA XONIQ.N BASIAHEI 
EYKAE KAI EYBOYAEY! KAI OEOI (kat) AAIMONE(c) AAAOI 

AL TPA ET QN YMQ. TENO EYXOMAI OABIOIN EINAI 

TONAN A ANTATIEIFESE! EPPO! ENEKA OYSI1 AG)KAQN 

SITE ME MOPA EAAMAZATO EITE AZTEPOTTHTI K(e)YPAYNO.N 
WYN A IKETI IKQI TTA! ATNHN PES EPONEAN 

m= ME! TPO®Q) TTEIWH EAPAIS ES EYATEIQI 


1. K may be compendium for K@ ; IS seems to be a mistake for N. 
3. EINAI either begun per compendium and then written in full, or else 
the N of oAfcov is compounded with the E. Cf. the next tablet. 
4. Se. rowav & avraréreia’ Epywv ever’ ovxi dixaiovr. 
6,7. Se. Nov & ixérns ikw rap’ ayyny (or adyauiy ?) Bepoediveray 
@s pe mpopper Teun €Opas es evayewr. 


VII. Compagno Tablet (c). 











DIRKA 
YAKA 





NO AY 
Aveta 
E APASET Ere 





670 Appendix 


EPXOMAI E KAQAPQ. KA® O BAZIAEAE 

EYKAE(YA) KA EYBOAEY KAI OEOI OZOI AMONES AAAO 
KAl TAP EX YQ FENOZ EYXOMAI EINAI OABIO 
TIOINAN NAFATTETE EPIFQ. OTI AIKAQ.N 

Er WE MOIP => - -- AZTEPOTTHTI (KAI) KEPAYNO 

NYN AE KE IKQX. AKQX. TIAPA PL E® 

a> ME POS TIEYE M EAPAZ E> EYTOQ 


1. Perhaps EKKA@APQ, a double K being written per compendium. 

KA®@ apparently KA@PO per compendium, or even xaOapa. The lette 
given as O is more like I, but really illegible. 

After BASIAEA (EA per compendium) a letter like E or R. The nam 
Eukles seems to have puzzled the scribe. 

2. EYKAEYA. The last letter may be A or A. Probably there is som 
confused dittography, as if the E suggested beginning EYKAE again. 

OSOI seems miswriting for KAT. 

3. YQ or YM: uncertain. 

Eivac per compendium: cf. the foregoing. Kaibel says of (6) and (e) 
“Haec duo carmina videntur ex communi archetypo esse descripta no 
solum quod inter se magis similia sunt quam utrumque primo, sed etiar 
propterea quod eadem ligatura in utroque verba dASwoy eivar scripta sunt. 

4. Or NATATIETEIS Pro for avrareéreso’. 

5, ET: perhaps compendium for etre. 

The = of dorepormre is like E. Before xepavvd there seems to be kai b, 

dittography. 






The general formulae represented by the three tablets together, may bi} 

translated : 
‘Out of the Pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below, 
And Eukles and Eubouleus, and other Gods and Daemons : 

For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race. 

And I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous, 

Whether it be that Fate laid me low or the Gods Immortal 

0 SES See ae with star-flung thunderbolt. 

I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel; 

I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired ; 

I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld ; 

I have passed with eager feet to (07 from) the Circle desired ; 

And now I come a suppliant to Holy Phersephoneia 

That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.— 

Happy and Blesséd One, thou shalt be God instead of Mortal.’ 

(The prose formula: ‘A kid I have fallen into milk’: is once inserted ir 
the midst of the poem.) 

To sum up, we find in these three tablets some common characteristics 
They all show traces of the influence of some colloquial Italian dialect. The 
form xo@apds is Thurian. The free omission and addition of final N is probably 
another Italian symptom, having its analogy in the treatment of final M in 
Latin. It seems not to have been pronounced. We find YMQ (vudr), TPO&O 


Appendix 671 


(popper), ATNH (ayjv), EYATEIQ (evayeav) and vice versa KPAYNON 
(xepavvo). There is the same uncertainty about I following another vowel: 
we have EPXOMA, MEI (ye), IKOI. The writer of (6), and perhaps of (c) also, 
did not understand what words he was writing. One could be more sure about 
(c) if it were not that some -of his most glaring apparent mistakes prove on 
examination to be compendiary forms and possibly accurate. 

But another form of compendiary writing occurs, I think, in all of these 
tablets, and is of more interest. 

There is a sentence which appears in (c) as 


ET ME MOIP.------------ ASTEPOTIHTI (KAI) KEPAYNO. 


Evidently not a complete sentence, any more than it is a complete verse, but a 
beginning and end with the middle omitted. 
In (0) we have it a little fuller. 


ITE ME MOPA EAAMASATO---- EITE AS TEPOTTHTI KPAYNON. 


This, with a little necessary emendation, might seem to be a complete 
| sentence, as indeed Kaibel takes it, were it not for a fuller version still in (a). 


“AAA ME pone EAAMAZSE KAI AOANATOI OEOI AAAOI 
oe angie ios KAI ASS TEPOBAHTA KEPAYNON. 

This fuller and correcter version is obviously incomplete, both in sense and 
in metre. The conclusion seems to be that we have in all three cases a con- 
fessedly incomplete collection of words, standing for a complete and well-known 
formula.~ The words seem to be from the beginning and end of the sentences. 
It is as though, in a community accustomed to the Anglican Church service, 
we found, first: “When the wicked man his soul alive.” Second, and de- 
ceptively complete in appearance: “When the wicked man shall save his 
soul alice.” Third, fuller and betraying its incompleteness: “When the 
wicked man turneth from save his soul alive.” 

Instances of this sort of abbreviation can be found in most liturgies, though 
of course in modern times we should put dots to mark the gap in the middle. 
But it is certainly not common on Greek inscriptions. Ordinary abbreviations 
are common enough—© K=@eoi Karay6ovio1, Spoves =Sdaipoves, and the like. 
And there is the system, if system it can be called, illustrated by the quotation 
from Gregory Nazianzene in the note on Tablet III. The case most closely 
resembling the present that is known to me is that of the Cyprian Curses, 
published by Miss Macdonald in the Proceedings of the Soc. Bibl. Archaeology, 
1890, p. 160 sqq. Cf. Winsch, Append. CIA, Praef. p. xviii sqq. They are 
prayers to all Ghosts and Daemons to hamper and paralyse and “take away the 
6upos from” some adversary, of whom the writer is in mortal fear. They begin 
with metrical formulae. 

The first starts : 


OIKATATHNKAMONE®SOI 
KTTATEPESTIATEPOQ.NKMHTEPE 

OIKOITINESENOAAEKEISOEKOITINES 
OEOYMONATTOKPAAIHSTIOAYKHAEA 
ONTES 


672 Appendix 


Another, No. IV.: 
ATA—ITHNKAMONESOITESTEK 
OANKMHTEPESANTIENIPOIANAPIOI 
NESTINESESTEKOITINESENOA 
EA 

These seem to represent two very similar formulae. The first will run : 
Aaipoves of kata ynv Kai Saipoves oitwes are, 
kai Ilarépes mratépwv cat Myrépes avtcéverpor (7), 
xotrives evOade Kxeicbe Kai oitiwes €vOa Kabnabe, 


eee c cee cee s cece eee er cece ese sesesesseseseseerssses sens stee 


Oupov azo tenuis moAvuknoéa mpdabe aBovtes. 


The other : 
Aaipoves of kata ynv Kai Saipoves oitwes Eare, 
kat Ilarépes matépwv Kai Mnrépes avreeverpor, . 
ape soeet caeeeeeatee aivdproe nde yvvaror, 
Saipoves olrives Eate Kal oitwes evOabde Keiabe 
<Oupov amo kpadins> modvkndéa <mpocbe AaBovres.> 

The reconstruction of the verses is helped out by several other smaller 
fragments. I have followed, with slight variations, Dieterich.and Winsch. 

Now here we find several points closely reminding us of the Compagno 
Tablets. (1) The different documents are all quoting the same magical poem. 
(2) Since the prayer is a prayer to take away somebody’s 6vyés, and otherwise 
weaken and paralyse him, I think we may conclude that the line @vpov azo 
kpadins moAuKndéa mpoobe AaBovres (Aurovres is added as a v. | in one only of 
the fragments) is the final line of the prayer. “Do this, that, and the other, 
having first taken a away the hurtful spirit out of his heart.” 

(3) The second tablet (No. IV.) gives a half line avdpioe 7Sé yvvaco, for 
which there is no place, and which therefore shows the incompleteness of a 
formula which, as written in No. I., might have seemed complete, exactly like 
kai dOavatoe Beot ddA in Compagno (@). 

There is possibly‘a case of the same phenomenon in the Eleuthernae tablets 
(II.). There is one place at the end where the metre is broken. It may be the 
full formula contained a series of questions, beginning with Tis & éo«; and 
ending with 16 & éo1;—Tas vids ni cai bpava aorepdevtos. If there were only 
one tablet containing the formula, one would prefer to suppose that Tis & €oc; 
no & €o1; was mere dittography, a scribe having first written the phrase slightly 
wrong and then re-written it right without deleting the first version. But this 
hypothesis becomes more difficult when there are three tablets differing in 
several particulars but agreeing in this unmetrical double question. 

In any case, it would probably be wisest to regard the tablets as each 
consisting of a series of formulae, mostly in verse but some in prose, some 
apparently complete, others compendiary. 


VILL. The Tablet of Caecilia Secundina. 
A thin gold tablet (75 mm. by 24 mm. in size) found in Rome about the 


A ppendize 673 


year 1899, probably in one of the ancient tombs on the Ostia Road; now in 
the British Museum. The script, though generally clear, is peculiar. The 
form of ¢ (cf. evkAeecev in line 2) is new to me, but in general the writing is 
like that of a cursive papyrus of Roman times. Prof. Comparetti, who has 
published and discussed the tablet in Atene e Roma, Liv. and Ly. (1903), 
considers it certainly later than the Herculanean papyri, and would place it in 
the second century or possibly the first, a.p. 


EPXUTG kK KAR ONIN K: 
SSNs Dest Neary: Jao 
AyAj 0 Tio I aAEH nee 


Oy Foe ABS wo PEM AOIAIMA NAN am 


TON Kd NAR Tyas ich NAG 
$ / 












I read it thus: : 
épxetat ex xabapay, xabapa xOoviwy Bacireca, 
Evkdees EvBouvded te. Aros téxos, dtda & Ey’ dde 
Mynpoovns, (ro dé Sadpov aoidysov avOpadrocw) 
KaxtAla Sexouvdeiva, vop@ aici draywya. 


‘She comes from the Pure, O Pure Queen of those below 

And Eukles and Eubouleus.—Child of Zeus, receive here the armour 
Of Memory, (‘tis a gift songful among men) 

Thou Caecilia Secundina, in due rite to avert evil for ever’ 


%. 2. Probably Ev«Aees as Comparetti: not evkrcé 7. The rest of this line is 
certain as far as Avds réxos: after that, I make out o7Aadeywde, the first 6 being 
(cf. that in rode below) very like a, and the o not well finished. Repeated ex- 
amination of the tablet has confirmed my belief that these are the inscribed 
letters; and I may add that Dr A“S. Murray and Mr Cecil Smitli, as well 
as Dr Hartwig, who formerly possessed the tablet, all independently read 
the same. 

Taking these letters as they stand, we may obtain sense, grammar and 
metre by dividing érda 8 &’ dde: “Have here the armour of Memory,” and I 
believe that this interpretation, though curious, is right. The change to the 
second person and the imperative addressed to the Soul are just like phrases 
in the other tablets: 3ABre Kai pakxaptore, GAAa mie pov, kTA. The peculiar use 
of dda, to which I can find nothing quite similar in our fragments of Orphic 
literature, has its exact parallel in St Paul’s repeated metaphors dda Scxato- 
aus (Rom. vi. 12; 2 Cor. vi. 7), irda hards (Rom. xiii. 2). The “armour of 
Mnemosyne” to an Orphic would probably bear just the same shade of meaning 
as the “armour of light” to a Christian. Lethe was the Orphic “ Darkness.” 
The use of d8« might be paralleled by Homer's zpopod’ dd, and the scholiasts 
have remarked long since that in the later Epic language éSe was used more 


H. 43 


674 Appendix 


freely than in Homer. The Cyprian Curses just quoted give vpeis of dde 
Keipevot 

A further question. here suggests itself. Who is the Avos réxos ? Eubouleus, 
by a straining of the identifications of mythologers, might claim the title ; and 
it would save trouble, no doubt, to admit his claim. But apart from the unfair 
advantage which this would give him over Eukles, a comparison of the phrases 
applied to the pure soul in the other tablets (@eds éyévov, tpay yevos ddBiov 
evxopuat eiva, etc.) suggests that “Child of Zeus” is vocative. “Child of Zeus, 
receive here thine armour of Memory.” The doctrine is orthodox in Orphism ; 
the completely pure soul is the pure blood of Zagreus, freed from the dross 
of charred Titan corpses, and as such is the child of Zeus. In an earlier stage 
it was Tas mais cal “Qpave. : 

(Prof. Comparetti reads avXaa on the tablet, which he takes to be a mistake 
for dmada “tender,” agreeing per sensum with rexos—not a very fortunate 
conjecture.) 


v. 3. Should we divide 76 dé or rode in apposition to érAa? 


v. 4. Scanned, apparently, =’kovydeiva: such licenses are of course common. 
The last three words, forming |. 6 on the tablet, are difficult. The line begins - 
with a vertical bar, like I, which in a document of an earlier time one would 
certainly take for the final I of NOMQI. Then follows ac «; the gap in the 
middle of the word would be less, if the bottom of the e were visible. After 
this I make out the letters arayoya, apparently the n. pl. of a word araywyos, 
“calculated to avert,’ opposed to éraywyis, “calculated to induce” magic 
influences. Mr Cecil Smith agrees with this reading. Prof. Comparetti, having 
only the photograph to work from, read [a}et duayeydoa, “having always lived 
lawfully.” s 

The “armour of Memory,” the “gift songful among men,” is firstly perhaps 
the spiritual gift, and then in a secondary sense the actual tablet which both 
symbolises and preserves from oblivion Cecilia’s claims to immortality; and 
does so in song. 

Caecilia Secundina is not otherwise known, but must have belonged in 
some way to the clan of Caecilii Secundi, She would thus be connected with 
the Younger Pliny, whose name before his adoption was Publius Caecilius 
Secundus. 


~G. M 


dyyerau Bacanoral 232? 
aytos 57 

ayveia 168 

G&yvowa 582 

a@yos 57, 58, 113, 114, 116 
adyupuds 151 

aOnpnrovybs 529 

arabe wtora 152 

aG\gita 88 

dyetaotpertl 605 

autuwv 335-337 

augpiBadys mats 77 
avabéccacba 46 

avacratra 132 

avéown 615 

“Ate rafpe 4383 

amayuya 587 
amodioroutetc Gar 26, 27, 43 
amiGectos 46 

améviuua 57, 58, 623 


arorouTai 8, 9 


amotpoT7n 68, 163, 256, 364, 509 


aroppddes 48 
apa 139-145 
apayvionrar 523 
agiépwoav 149 


BadXnris 155 
Bacxdyia 191 
Bacoapixa 4921 
Bourd7é 369 
Bpéuos 416, 417 
Bptrov 424 
Bwpdés 61, 62 


yipas 173 


Aa 271 

dainoves 588, 625, 658 
decotdarmovia 4—7 
déuara 1412 
Oevrepdmotpa 244 
Anunrpeto. 267, 600 
Ata, festival of 23, 143 
OvoTroutrety 43 

Avos x&dcoy 23-28, 643 
Opakawa 232 


INDEX. 


GREEK. 


dpaxovTwoers 233 
dpaua and dpeéyeva 568-571 
Opwueva 283, 568-571 


éyxuTpifew 36 
édacts 152 
éuacxanricbn 69 
"EuBapés elu 70 
évayets 58 

évayifew 53-63 
évayicuata 470, 629, 630 
évayicpot 53-63, 161 
évOeos 426 

émaywyal 140 
éraywyn 587 
émiBalyw 593 
éromreia 516, 547 
éfapyuata 69 
étéXacis 106 

épipos 595 

écxdpa 61, 62, 147} 
éoxapar 125 
Etvédveuo 251 

evela 430 

evior yuvatkes 414 
evxy 142 

épodar 219 


npia 129 


nyntnpia 116 
hepopotris 215 


Bartaia 77 
Odpyndos 76 
Geparreia 3, 163, 181, 256 
bécKxeXos 137 
Gecuot 137, 643 
Géccacbar 46 
Opivaé 530%, 532 
@pévos 514, 548 
Ovew 53 

BvecGar 67 

Oipata émixwpia 14 
Gica 430 

Gucia 80 

6voia d&datros 


43—2 


676 


lepd 555 

iepetov 54 

iepedew 53 

lepds ydpos 482 
immoe 4751 
“Immodttw 6 ém 355 
Wyé 139 


xadappuol 116, 161 
xaboowaas 401 
Kdoopia 210 
xaropytdcas 401 
xépvos 158? 

Kip TupBodxos 213 
kipes Oavdro.o 
knpitpepyjs 184, 185 
Khpuxes 172? 

kiwéw 43? 

KAps 554} 

Koyé dumaé 161 
KoduuBnOpa 35 
Kpelrroves 327, 335, 340 
Kvkdos 5911 


Anrepac 248 
AcOoBorla 155 
Alxvov 158? 


Ma 271° 

Maia 262 

pwéyapa 61, 123, 125 
péOn 423 

pHeXorovda 423 

picos and puvorjpiov 154 
bbw 153 


vapOnkopbpa 4741 
vouima 511, 513 
Nipdn 262 
vidios 539% 
Nupdov 539 
Nica 412} 


Absyrtos 68 
Achaia 128 
Acheloiis 435 
Adikia 613 
Adrastos 362 
Agathos Daimon 357, 544 
Aglauros 287 
Agnoia 585 
Agnus castus 106, 130 
Agrae 560 
— mysteries at 557-561 
Agrionia 465 


II. 


Index 


émda 587 

Spxia Téuvew 64 
bora 599 

ootérns 478 

éctwbels 4991, 600 
ovAoxUTat 54, 86-89 


maykaprla 80, 159, 643 
mavra pet 164 

maotTés, mactds 536 
mé\avos 88-90 

motGectos 46 

mourn 152 

méoTua Onpdv 194, 264-266 
mpoBatra -15 

mpokabapats 560 

mpogBorai 219 


oTéupata 594 ~ 
atépavos a93 

aotvyvorns 15 

civOnua 1554 

opayia 63-73, 245, 250 


Téuvew opayia 64 
Tidnvac 402, 465, 500 
tpayos 416, 421, 422 
Tpaywoia 421 


ve xve 161 
UrokéAmcos 594 


gpaos pvevrns 645 
glkodka 645 
ptdaxes 374, 580 


Xaptivn 405 
xpnoré 335 
xUTpat 3d 
xUTpwo, ol 3d 
xUTpos 79 


wpopayla 483, 485 


GENERAL. 


“Aiakos 611 


Aigisthos 335 
Aioleiai 409 
Alemaeon 220, 481 
Alphita 156 
Amphiaraos 27, 344 
Amynos 845-347 
Anaklethra 604 
Ananke 270, 606 


Anodos 122, 126, 276-285, 


Anthesteria 32-74 
Anthropomorphism 70 


604 


Index 677 


Aphrodite 308-316, 641 Cremation 510 
Apollo and Orpheus 460 Cretans, the 479 
Archemoros 339 Crete 460, 565-568 
Archibacchos 476 Curses 138-145 
Ares 375-377 Cyamites 545 
Argei 117 
Arrephoria 131-134 Danaides 614-624 
Artemis 299-301 Delphi, influence of 557-561 
Artemis Munychia 71 Demeter and Kore 271-273 
Asklepios 341-350 ‘Demeter’s people,’ dead as 267 
Athamas 110, 513 Dendrites 426-432 = 
Athene 301-308 Deo 272 
Athene Aithuia 305 Despoina 594-598, 600 
Athene, birth of 366 Devotion 161, 523 
Aversion, gods of, ceremonies of 8, 9 Dexion 346-347 

Diasia 11-28 
Bacchoi 474-478, 561 Dike 507, 613 
Bacchos 433 Dionysos 364 
‘Bacchos’ 479, 480 — at Eleusis 557, 561 
Banquet of the Blest 614 — grave of 558 
Baptism 597 — Omestes 71 
Bassarids 461 — on hero-reliefs 360-363 
Bath, ritual 312 Dipolia 111 
Baubo 570, 5701 Dirae 23, 143 
Beating ceremonial 100 ‘Dirae’ of Teos 143 
Bee 443, 444 ~ Dithyramb 412 
Bellerophon 220 Dithyrambos 437-445 
Bessi 370, 371 Dodona, gong at 570 
Birth of Aphrodite 312 Dolioli 44 
Birth, Sacred 549-552 Drama, origin of 568 
Book of the Dead 577, 589 Drunkenness 448 
Boreads 181 Dryas 369 
Boukolion 537, 539 
Bouphonia 111-113 Egg in Mysteries 628-630 
Brimo 552-554 Hiraphiotes 488-595 
Brimos 526, 5491 Hirene 270 
Bromios 414-417, 531 Hiresione 77-82 
Buckthorn 37 Eleusinian Mysteries 540 
Bull-God 432-437, 516 Ennoia 584-585 
Bull-roarer 5272 Epikleidia 554} 
Burning Bush 410 Epimenides 401 
‘Busk’ 118 Epoptes 547 

Erechtheus 555 
Caecilia Secundina 586, 587 Ergane 520 
Calendar, -Attic 29 Erichthonios 406 
Cereal intoxicants 416-525 Erikapaios 649 
Cervisia 424 HErinyes 61, 68, 213-239 
‘Chalecidian pursuit’ 129 Eris 250 
Chaos 516 Eros 626-659 
Charila 106 — and Psyche 533 
Charites 287-299, 438, 439 — and the Mother 639-641 
Choes 38-40 Eubouleus 586, 587, 588 
Chryse 306 Euukles 586, 587, 588 
Chthon 200 Eumenides 253-256 
Chytroi 33-37 Eumolpidae 554-557 
Cicones 457, 470 Eumolpos 554-557 
Circle 593-595 Eunoé 583, 584 
Clouds, parody of Orphism in 512 Eurydice 461, 603-605 
Cnossos 483 Eurynomos 186 
Commination Service 145 Euthyphron, discussion of religion in 
Cradle 524, 528 the 2 


Credo and Confiteor 156 Everruncatio 115 


678 


Eye, Evil 196 


Fan, winnowing 528-535 
February 48-51 
Februum 49 

Feralia 49 

Figs for purification 99 
Flaminica Dialis 117 
Flammeum 522 

Fleece of purification 548 
Flight ceremonies 113 
Fox totem 462 
‘Frummety’ 892 


Gephyrismoi 136 
Gong of Dodona 570 
Gorgoneion 187-191 
Graiae 194-196 
Gypsum 135, 514 


Hades 601 
Haloa 145-150 
Harpies 178-183 
Harvest-festivals 75-119 
Head of Orpheus 469 
Hebe-Ganymeda 325 
Hecate 288 
Helen Dendritis 322 
Helios 462, 463 
Hephaistos 377 
Hepialos 167 
Hera 316-319 
Herakles 166, 347 

— at Agrae 547 

— at Sekyon 55 

— in Hades 612 

initiation of 547 

Fico Eros as 631 
Hermes 631 

— Chthonios 34, 35, 249 
Heroes 326-363 
‘Hero-Feasts’ 350-363, 615 
Hero-healers 341-350 
Heroines, cult of 323-326 
Herois 403 
Hersephoria 287 
Hesychidae 247 
Hesychos 247 


Hierophant 550, 551, 564, 571, 594 


Hippolytos 354, 512 
Holocaust 16 
Honey 597 
Horse-demons 388 
Horse-Medusa 179 
‘Horses’ 476 

Hosia 507 

Hosioi 434, 501-508 
Hyakinthos 339 


Iacchos 379, 414, 541-545 
Tasion 565, 566 
‘Ikarios’ reliefs 361 


Index 


Immortality 478, 571 
Inferiae 47 
Intichiuma 83 
Iobaccheia 538 
Iobaccheion 475 
Tobacchoi 656 
Isodaites 441, 482 
Ivy 429 


Judges in Hades 610 


Kabeiroi 653, 654 
Kalligeneia 126, 130, 270 
Kallynteria 114-116 
Karpophoros 263 
Kathodos 123 

Ker, Eros as 632, 636 
Keraunia 408-411 

Keres 331, 41-43, 165-217 
Kernophoria 160-549, 559 
Kernophoros 559 

Kernos 158, 159, 160, 549 
Kerostasia 183 
Kerykainae 212 

Kerykeion 42, 277 

Kid 595 

Klodones 373 

Kore and Demeter 271-273 
Koreia 145 

Korybantes 515 

Korybas 570 

Koures 401, 570 


Kouretes 172, 485, 492, 499-501 


Kourotrophos 267-271 
Krithologos 87 
Kronia 110 

Kykeon 155, 156 


Leibethra 457, 462, 469 
Lemuria 33, 34 

Lesbos 466-468 

Lethe 575-584 

Liber 528, 538 

Libera 528, 538 

Libum 89 

Likna 403 


Liknites 402, 403, 523, 524, 582, 534, 


550 
Liknon 519-535 
Liknophoria 518-535, 547-549 
Liknophoros 534 
Loutrophoria 622 
Lupercalia 49-51 
Lycomids 471 
Lycurgus 369 


Maenads 389 
Maiden 262 
Maimaktes 17 
Maniae 255 


Marriage, the Sacred 535-538, 549-552 


Masks, in ritual 188 





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